If the only thing you know about a constituent is an e-mail address, how would you create a record for them in Tessitura? No names, no mailing addresses or phone—just an e-mail address and nothing else.
This came up last year on the forums via Margaret Stockton at JALC and the answer was don't—keep e-mails in your e-mail messaging service only.
http://www.tessituranetwork.com/Community/forums/t/15420.aspx
But does anyone ignore that advice? Do you enter them as Individuals? Or did you make a new type of constituent in TR_CUST_TYPE? What do you enter in the name fields?
Thanks!
-- Mike
We do put them into Tessitura with only an email address if they sign up for our newsletter via the simple sign-up on the main page of our website.
I didn't really want to do it but we've put procedures in place to cope with some of the duplicates that get created etc.
The website creates the record with a first and last name of newsletter and then adds the address as required, required and just adds the email address and then subscribes them to the E-Newsletter preference.
Each day we have an auto procedure check for email addresses that are duplicates of ones we already have in the system and they get inserted to the the Merge screen ready to be merged later that day.
Other than this I try and discourage any email only imports, if we do get these lists from students signing up at a stand at Freshers week etc. then I tend to import them with the address of the University etc.
Caryl
We do for our e-newsletter, but have the address set to our own as it is required. It's also marked as an Invalid Mailing Address so that we don't accidentally mail to it.
Like Caryl, I was opposed, but was outnumbered. We are on-top of our merges and just ensure that they get merged if duplicates exist. They are created as individuals.
Michele
We are using TNEW, and this is exactly what happens, when a patron logs in using his Facebook account but does not make a purchase: We end up with an account with e-mail address as the only contact information, which is very annoying for our ticket office but not so for our marketing department. My appologies for asking an additional question here, but is this happening because we did not set up the Facebook interface correctly in TNEW, or is this the expected behaviour? If so, is there a way to obtain the missing postal addresses and phone numbers from Facebook or other sources?
Thanks,
Ahmet
PS I agree with Tom that we can and should explore the issue of "micro identity" and related issues in TLCC 2017 in an Open Space Discussion. We can do this under the light of the new contact permissions framework in v14.
Thanks, everyone! And Tom, I will consider further discussion at the conference!
Mike,
First this is a really interesting question. Second I don’t have a good answer for you. In fact I don’t think one exists right now in the Tessitura Community. I do want to point out this is just one of a number of similar “micro identity” questions I’ve been thinking and talking about over the past few years. A “Micro identity” is a term I sort of coined to cover a range of partial identifies we may have for patrons that we may want to track and maybe aggregate over time with our current of future Tessitura Records. These micro identities could include:
· Email Address Alone
· Ethernet Mac Address picked up by our routers from folks phones, tablets and computers brought into our buildings.
o Blue tooth addresses
· Various types of cookies from web pages.
· Facebook IDs with related public information from Facebook
· Customer surveys
· Yelp Posts about our organizations.
· Twitter handles with related information from twitter
· Photos from our security systems
· The list goes on and on … I’m sure that there are many others that folks might want to add here …
Tessitura does not give us a good way to track such “micro identity” information in a standard way. And then link them up over time to produce more complete customer profiles.
Do we need to come up with standard practices as a community for tracking such “micro identities.” I think that this is a very interesting question worth working on. And to be industry leaders we may find value in getting a handle on this topic. I’d like to be part of those conversations.
That said, one of the next questions that comes up when thinking about these micro identities is what do we need them for, and plan to do with these. This will lead to a more complete description of the technical solution. If all you are trying to do is send some email then the suggestion about just sending the values to your mail platform makes some sense. However, If you want to go further and bring together a number of these micro identities to provide a more full featured profile of patrons you already know and others you have very little information, that may not yet be ticket purchasers, then that strategy is very limiting.
What might we do with this type of data. On the sales or development side some folks might be interested in using it for marketing. Some might take that next step try to do some de-anonymization. You might use this to recognize and track Scalpers. This might be helpful for Space utilization. Staff scheduling. HVAC Management. In the area of real time operations management. There are other potential uses including physical security. Knowing ones patrons provides many more opportunities in the customer care, cost management areas …
Finally over the next decade this is something that as organizations we will have to think critically about. All of these activities have a potential for crossing the creepy line. And in some areas of the world this might be considered illegal. See my post here about “UK charities fined for data law breaches”.
Mike, let us know where you end up going with this.
--Tom
P.S. This would be a great topic at TLCC 2017 for an Open Space Discussion… Please consider convening a session like this.
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I would create an account and make the name something like “Opera Patron”—no prefix. This allows you to collect engagement history, even if you don’t know much about this patron.
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Lucie Spieler
IT Development and Training Manager FLORIDA GRAND opera