The conversation in another thread on Dashboards led to an important new topic: How to structure and manage patron information. We deal with Individuals who have relationships -- marital/family, employment, group contacts, teachers, organizations. The same person can be acting in a different capacities at different times -- in one instance, as a private individual, in another, as the member of a family, in another, as a contact for a foundation, group, school or corporation. In fact, they could be a contact at multiple organizations, or different organizations at different points in time. We also want to know about their assistants and various types of other relationships. These can be time- and transaction-dependent.
So, what are the issues and requirements in this area, and how might we address them in the future?
Below are the original comments from Kay, Eric, Dan and Karyn:
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This is dead-on for our organization. Something our Board has been asking for is a sort of “mind-mapping” view of relationships. I know that Facebook has an application that literally charts out how people are connected. This would be a great tool to identify relationships to at-risk donors & patrons or to identify new prospects and find second contacts to continue their cultivation.Karyn
We face this challenge all the time – as I’m sure others do as well.
Perhaps one solution is to capture information about individuals separately and combine them together into relationships as necessary. Through social networking types of extensions to the web api you might be able to let the users control some aspect of this themselves too – for users registered on your site.
In any case – an address refers to a physical location, be it a house, business, school or other place. The address can then be associated to an individual by purpose. The people can be associated with one another as well. The notion of an account then sort of goes away and what you end up with is a record of historical interactions, transactions, associations, relationships and other connections with people, locations, products, events and more.
Value of transactions that are performed by one individual on behalf of more than one individual may need to be worked out.
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Daniel L. Spees
Director, Information Services & Support
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
312-294-3320
speesd@cso.org
http://www.cso.org
Make your plans now for our season finale Dvořák Festival in June!
http://www.cso.org/dvorak
From: Tessitura Next Generation Forum [mailto:forums-nextgeneration@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Eric EvenskaasSent: Monday, June 22, 2009 12:16 PMTo: Spees, DanielSubject: Re: [Tessitura Next Generation Forum] RE: RE: Welcome from the Board Steering Committee and Next Generation Thoughts
Kay get's at another question here which is "what is an account?" The standard husbad + wife account is now out of date. We have siblings who subscribe together, mothers and daughters who live at different addresses, one of which buys the subscriptions the other does the donating, etc. Do you create separate accounts for each of these people or cram them together? Website logins pose another challenge where some couples share an email address/login and others don't. Then there's education programming with parents, teenagers and children...
It would be great if an "account" could better handle this web of associations that our patrons have and present it an elegant, visual way. Something more advance than the current Associations tab.
From: Kay Burnham <bounce-kayburnham8765@tessituranetwork.com>Sent: 6/22/2009 11:52:10 AM
I like the concept of the Dashboard. It could be something like Google as previously mentioned or something like Macs use that can be called as an overlay on the screen you are looking at or maybe both. There are times when processing an order that it would be great to be able to have a translucent overlay of other information so that you can see what you are working on along with the additional information, especially when it comes to Research notes or CSIs in a record that may pertain directly to the transaction being processed.
Something like this would also come in handy if we start to change the way that we look at patron records. Right now we try to find a way to have all the patron information in one record, but we struggle with the fact that many patrons don’t want their information all in one record. The husband and wife may want a joint record as well as having separate individual records. Having the ability to allow patrons to have their information stored on our system the way they want and have a very robust and fluid connection between the information in each record would satisfy both internal and external needs. A dashboard might be a way to visually combine the data from multiple records with a specific association.
One of the fundamental struggles our Development and Patron Departments have is the management and recall of relational data. We are constantly reminded of the ease they enjoyed under their previous program. To this end, we've attempted to expand and manipulate the association area of Tessitura, have investigated and designed custom reports and tabs to handle the information required. Unfortunately, whilst this holds the information it's not readily available, requires click on click to both input and extract and is not seen in the one area as a final comprehensive report on the constituent.
What we're looking for is a one stop shop where fluid data entry corresponds with simple and comprehensive reporting.
The program they used before covered much of this and in it's current incarnation, it covers the rest. To that end I would suggest the functionality and overall effectiveness of the Raiser's Edge program coupled with the ticketing capabilities of Tessitura would be a good start point for producing a superior end result.
Lesley