Hello,
The Science Museum of Minnesota is about to come out of a capital campaign and we're looking for new ways to track prospects for major gifts. Currently, we create solicitations in the records of constituents who we believe would be good prospects for a specific gift and just use the designations to track what the solicitation is for. Unfortunately, when our capital campaign is over we won’t have a campaign to put solicitations in – and will instead need to be able to come up with lists of constituents which gift officers will sort through to come up with those who we will solicit.
Going forward, we are looking at using the "interests" section of Tessitura to track our prospects, and I am wondering if anyone else has used this area of Tessitura for this function yet. I am planning on creating a custom report that we can use to pull interest value, interest weight (we have yet to determine how we will weight our interests), giving capacity, giving history to the organization, and several other values so that our gift officers can evaluate the prospects. In the past, we have done wealth screenings on our database and have uploaded giving capacities into attributes but we are looking at being able to combine that information with knowledge gained by our program officers in order to pull more specified lists.
Does anyone have any insight on using this area of Tessitura? Our organization has pretty much left it alone in the past so we’re starting from scratch and any help you have would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Laine
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Laine Kyllonen
Database Application Specialist
Science Museum of Minnesota
(651) 221-2515
Hi Laine,
In the v12 enhancements to solicitations (which get renamed to plans), we’ve added a new campaign type for this kind of use, prospect campaigns. Prospect campaigns can be created as placeholder campaigns for solicitations until they become more specifically targeted. What makes prospect campaigns special is that they can’t be used in transactions and will get filtered out of places where you would pick campaigns for transactional reporting, so they won’t get confused with regular campaigns. You might want to keep this around-the-corner functionality in mind as you make your prospect tracking plans. You could create what’s essentially a placeholder campaign now by adding a new campaign and not associating it with any funds (so that it can’t be used in a contribution), and then keep using solicitations for managing your prospects.
All of this is not to say that using interests would be a bad idea, but I’d hate to see you put in a lot of work on something new now only to find that we are giving you the functionality you need six months from now.
You can read up on Plans (enhanced solicitations) in the What’s New in v12 document. And you can find the documentation on interests here.
Kevin Sheehan
Senior Technical Writer & Consultant
Tessitura Network
+1 888 643 5778 x 329
ksheehan@tessituranetwork.com
Hi Kevin,
We created placeholder campaigns prior to v12, just as suggested above. Now that we are in v12, is there a way to change these campaigns we created into prospect campaigns without having to rebuild? They defaulted to regular campaigns during the upgrade.
Deanna