Dearest Friends--
We're wanting to explore the world of enhancing our database to feature various points of demographic information that we don't presently track--like ethnicity for example--and I'm wondering if anyone how folks might have achieved more specialized or specific demographics tracking in Tessitura. Are you utilizing an outside company? Internal teams of coders? Creatively using features already in the box?
Thank you for your thoughts on this!
Brian Jones
My experience has been that organizations typically use Attributes to handle information like this. Attributes give you a lot of features to segment the patrons after the data is entered in the system (i.e. through list criteria).
If the organization is purchasing this kind of information from an outside source, they would usually come to me (the DBA) to have the entire data set imported into the appropriate attributes en masse. This is fairly straightforward assuming that the Tessitura customer number is attached to the data returned from the outside source.
The other channel I've seen the data collected is usually from students enrolled in a school with the organization. The information is fille dout on the enrollment form and then the users manually enter the attribute values as part of the enrollment process in Tessitura.
Unless you have some very customized usages in mind for this data, I think Attributes are the best place to store them in Tessitura.
Hi Brian -
I'll chime in here and say that for a while we were creatively using standard Tessitura elements (attributes, associations) for demographic information. We started buying some demographic information from an outside company and quickly realized that there were a couple of key pieces of information that we needed to be able to add to that demographic information that we couldn't track using something like attributes and so have moved to a custom tab and custom screen.
What we found, especially on buying information, was that we needed ways to say 'Yes, this information is valid and we verified it' or 'Wow, this information is not valid, this patron is not 88 years old but we did verify it' or 'We have no idea if this info is valid as it is not verified'. We also needed a way to inactivate data as it became old or we got newer data refreshes.
HTH,
Heather
Awesome--Thank you both!
I suppose this begs the question of who sells this sort of data?
There are bunches of places out there that will append demographic information to your data. We are currently using Target Resource Group (TRG). But there's lots out there - Experian (QAS), MBS (the NCOA people, now eBay owned), etc.
If you have a relationship with any company who runs any sort of marketing data, most likely they'll be able to do a data append for a price.