Constituencies

We use constituencies primarily to indicate the fact that a patron belongs to a group. For example:

            She is a regular supporting member; we have different constituencies for different levels of membership..

            She is a member of the Board.

            He is a staff member.

            She is a volunteer.

            He is a subscriber.

While we do not yet fully use solicitations, we would NOT use constituencies to track prospects. Solicitations are designed for just that purpose.

_______________

Julie P. Hamre

Finance/Development Associate

Strathmore Hall Foundation, Inc.

5301 Tuckerman Lane

North Bethesda, MD  20852-3385

301.581.5136; fax 301.581.5201

in office Monday-Tuesday-Thursday

www.strathmore.org

Support what you love. Strathmore Stars enjoy

10% off Strathmore performance tickets, advance

ticket purchase, discounts in the Shops at

Strathmore and in Tea Room, and access to special events.

We are in the process of trying to clean up our records, including attributes and constituencies. In doing this, we've realized our constituencies tend to be repetitive with information found in other places in a Tess record. Out of curiosity --

What do you have constituencies for and why?

Does it seem like better practice to track your prospects for foundation, gov, individual, etc. in a solicitation rather than a constituency?

Thanks!

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Heather,

Wow, how do you nightly wipe and reform constituencies?

Email or call me offline.

Hi Sara -

We tend to think of our constituencies as quick labels that are, for the most part, generated off other information in Tessitura. Most of our constituencies are all based on things stored elsewhere - ticket/donations, relationships, CSIs, attributes, solicitations, etc. We nightly wipe and reform most constituencies to make sure that the information is current. Our staff are trained (mostly) to view constituencies as a quick label, but not something that should be edited by them. We use it mostly as identifiers on the customer header and in reporting.

We've definitely gone the way of a solicitation for tracking prospects, and then my nightly script goes out, looks for an active solicitation and creates a constituency of the correct type.

HTH,

Heather

One other thought to add:  we’ve found Constituencies extremely useful on the Search screen.    We created a service interceptor that takes advantage of the new single line search in v11.    We can enter any constituency code (such as a Board) and instantly get all the constituents returned in the search screen.    We’re happy to share that interceptor if anyone is interested.

From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Matthew Echert
Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2013 2:03 PM
To: Levine, Alan
Subject: Re: [Tessitura Development Forum] Constituencies

Hi Sara,

I definitely second what Heather says, although I don't think we're updating our constituencies quite that frequently. (Though I could be wrong.)

Institutionally, we have manually updated constituencies for key groups like the board, staff, dancers, students, etc. It's handy to be able to see those people immediately in the headers, or to pull them into (or keep them out of) a list. On the development side we have different constituencies tied to each of our different membership categories, and one for our young patrons group. We are experimenting with using constituencies to flag high capacity donor prospects, but the main reason for doing that is so that we can use NScan monitoring to know when they enter the house.

We are making extensive use of solicitations this year for the first time, and I would highly recommend going that route. We've definitely invested a lot of time in making solicitations work in a way that makes sense for our development officers, but I'd say it's definitely worth it. You can plan with so much more detail using solicitations than with constituencies--plan for asks in multiple years, multiple campaigns, multiple designations, for example, and use tasks. You can track how much you're asking for and run reports on it. My goal is to get everybody doing everything in Tessitura instead of on spreadsheets. (We're not quite there yet, but a guy can dream...!) Plus, solicitations are getting a makeover in v12, so there's also that to look forward to.

If you have questions about moving to solicitations, I'm happy to share my experiences so far.

We are in the process of trying to clean up our records, including attributes and constituencies. In doing this, we've realized our constituencies tend to be repetitive with information found in other places in a Tess record. Out of curiosity --

What do you have constituencies for and why?

Does it seem like better practice to track your prospects for foundation, gov, individual, etc. in a solicitation rather than a constituency?

Thanks!

This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Development Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Development forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!

I concur.  One nice thing about constituencies is that during gift entry/ticket purchase the staff member can see the constituency such as a board member, when processing a transaction.  Another useful item is that when I use the output set and pull constituencies, those that are on an individual account, like board member, are included when pulling the household accounts.

For solicitations, we have the Flex header set to show the latest solicitation in the header. 

T.C. Brown

Database Administrator

412.392.4834

I agree with what everyone has already said. The other thing that constituencies can be really useful for are pulling quick lists. If you have a constituency that gets assigned to everyone that is an active subscriber than it's really easy to pull a list just based on that constituency of "Sub" for example. In addition to the quick glance header functionality I think that's the other advantage of various constituencies. 

And yes, solicitations are the best place to manage all of your prospect information. You could put it in constituencies as well if it was helpful for you in the header.