Hi All,
I'm wondering if there are some Education Departments out there functioning well without a database administrator. I learned a lot of great stuff at the Tessitura Conference last year regarding registration, but I have no way to implement it.
For those of you without a dba, can you speak to how you solved for this issue and implemented the changes you needed? I noticed that a lot of the trainings at the conference are based around the assumption that an organization has a database administrator...
Thanks for your time!
Halley
Hi Halley,
In my experience, many education programs can be tracked in the database using built-in functionality (like ticket orders, constituent data, etc.) as long custom reports can be written that get the data back out. Is there anyone at your organization that could write reports?
Does your organization have a standing Tessitura User Group who could tackle issues and decide who among your organization could be granted database power user rights? If your education department could elect a power user, that person could be granted admin-like rights such as modifying tables, performance setup, etc.
-Michael Wilcox, Science Museum of Minnesota
Hi Michael,
Thanks for this information. We used to have a user group, and it may be up to me to try to get it running again. I will follow up with some development folks regarding report writing and power users. We've all been a little scattered since opening up the new SFJAZZ Center, but I'm determined to get Education up to speed and represented in Tessitura! Right now I'm just creating class lists based on ticket perf numbers and using attributes as much as possible to group our various Education constituents appropriately.
Thanks again,
That sounds like a good plan. If your Development folks need persuasion/help, remember that you can of course start with an existing report and make changes instead of building from the ground up.
Since you mentioned class lists, I will also point out that if Ticket Orders seems like it's overkill for what you need to accomplish (performance set up, seasons, order processing, etc.), and if you aren't collecting money, you can also create manual lists in List Manager. It's much easier to create a list of constituents that way for a one-off or unique program. Not as much extra data can be collected, but it's easier if you don't have a big staff to wrangle that data!
Good luck,