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Constituent Contact Business Practices

Kjersten Schladetzky
$organization

Hello Tessitura world,

As we implement Tessitura, which for us will mean bringing many different databases together into one fabulous CRM, we are also starting to think about some new business processes we need to put in place.  Some questions we're wresting with are:

Should we set a guideline around how often we want to contact constituents (e.g. we will only 'touch' someone 2 times a week)?
Are there certain groups of people that require special permission to contact?  How is this accomplished?
Is there someone who has an overall view of all communications leaving the organization to ensure we aren't sending conflicting messages?  Who is the logical person to fill this role?

Of course we realize that many of these things are currently an issue with our disparate databases. The difference is we don't know about it.  ;)

I'd love to hear from other organizations who have wrestled with similar questions and where they landed.

Thank you!

Kjersten

  • $organization

    Hi Kjersten,

    We have some internal guidelines that inform if and when we contact people with marketing messages. If I could distil it down to a few key points they would be:

    • Never contact the same person via email within three days
      • This is managed by a 'saved search' in Mail2 which automatically excludes these people if they have received comms from us
    • Only one person pulls lists or extracts data from Tessitura for the purpose of contacting
      • This ensures we have someone responsible for ensuring that customer data with no-contact flags is not exported and any privacy flags are upheld
    • All external comms are sent out via the Marketing department. This even includes things like VIP ticketing forms which are not generally part of the Marketing department's job, but ensures they are in line with all other comms

    I hope that helps! It's obviously very complex and we still deal with multiple sources of data with different privacy questions regarding being contacted, so it's always at the forefront for us.

    Cheers

    David Geoffrey Hall

  • $organization

    Hi Kjersten -

    We do a couple of things to manage our contacts. We have a shared outlook calendar in our public folders where we actually track all the mailings/emails/sometimes phone that we do. Key people in each department have the role of inputting these items on the calendar. Then, once a week we have a 15-30 minute meeting (depending on the volume of things going out) where we all sit/stand around a screen and look at the upcoming contacts. We call this meeting our 'Communicating with Our Patrons' meeting (COP for short). We make sure we aren't touching the same people multiple times in a week - especially in the same medium - and we also make sure that we're not bombarding people with multiple messages that could be confusing. [There was the time when we sent out two invitations, one to a War Horse preview event and one to a lunch on a cruise ship - and people thought we were bringing horses on to a ship. Patrons confuse easily.]

    I tend to run people through the calendar  in the meeting just because I'm usually involved in the list pulling and need to know what patrons are getting what. For mailings, we have a couple of people who can, and do, pull lists. For emails it all goes through one person (me) in order to make sure that we respect all the various privacy/suppressions. But we are a smaller organization - so that onus is not too great to pull 3-4 lists per week.

    I've found that it is helpful to have some of the 'higher ups' present in that meeting so when we do run into a conflict, someone has the final say. 

    HTH,

    Heather