Do your organizations have a way of tracking a list of prospects in Tessitura without creating an account or constituent ID for each prospect? I know you can create an account for each and track prospects that way, but we're thinking it would be nice to keep a list of prospects in there without taking up the extra room that making them each constituents would take. Thanks.
Hi Lyndsi,
You could consider creating an account called something like Donor Prospects as a holding zone. Then use relationships to create associations without constituent IDs, using only the name, a relationship type, and some notes to track them. There is no account info tied to them, but you could put in a short biography. If you did end up making them accounts, you could easily add their constituent ID to the relationship record. You could also create additional prospect accounts (i.e. Major Gift Prospects, Planned Giving Prospects, ect) if you had other types of prospects.
There are some cautions based on the way I've seen usage of these types of relationships go in the past though. It easily leads to duplicates and information housed in two separate places if a prospect exists somewhere else in the database. If there aren't strict data entry policies in place, I've seen people simply add a contact's name without taking the time to look up and link an existing account. Also, if you go this way, there should be a clear line where the prospect should have an account created. At my org, I find our gift officers have to move so quickly that if notes don't go into the correct place on an account from day one, they end up in strange and unwieldy locations that can be difficult to track. I would only use the relationships option if I had hundreds of prospects and did not expect to connect with very many.