Hello,
Oklahoma Contemporary is in the testing phase of transferring to Tessitura and using TNEW to sell camps/class online. We currently use Greater Giving and massively complex Excel spreadsheets (all manual entry to Excel from registration emails sent automatically from Greater Giving) to track camp/class info. We collect a lot of info online that doesn't seem to have a place to automatically transfer in a constituent record (student name, preferred name, allergies, medication, behavior modification, emergency contact, etc.). We were promised in the discovery phase that Tessitura/TNEW would help alleviate manual entry/save time. Does anyone else have any solutions/suggestions/experience with streamlining the online registration info to constituent record to useful reporting process? I am struggling on troubleshooting how to extract the registration info or how to manipulate the data that does not live anywhere in the constituent record. Is the only solution custom tabs?
Thanks,
Emily Burton, Education Associate
Oklahoma Contemporary
eburton@okcontemp.org
Education is one of the more complicated things one can do with Tessitura.
There are a variety of standard-ish places to keep education specific items that are characteristics of individuals like Date or Year of Birth, Medical/dietary/educational accommodations... These can often go in Organization-specific attributes
Preferred Names can go in Alias's
Emergency Contacts, Authorized for Pickup can be handled by a relationship type. Or you can include this as part of order / offering specific information.
Knowing where you want to store this kind of information about individuals and relationships is important going into an Education Project.
Then you will have items that are specific to specific offerings (classes/camps). Things like T-Shirt Sizes for the camp. Sign-offs for taking Photos, medical treatment in an emergency, Qualifications to participate in a particular offering. This list can go on and on and on.. But the point is that these are all related to the specific offering that the customer is purchasing. And this set of questions varies wildly from one product to the next. The T-New customization may be able to ask these kinds of offering specific questions you need to ask.
One piece of advice, consider some of the most critical types of output you are looking for going into the project. Decide if you are going to do custom report, output sets, custom screens. Thinking through some of your key output results prior to starting the project will lead to a smoother project. Your crazy spreadsheets may help you figure out some of these issues. But be ready to think about the reasons you are gathering the data. Who needs to use the data.