When working with organizations that have branches. For example:
What Association type do you use?
Do you have a unique Association type for each and every type?
Or
Do you use one generic type of associations something like "Branch" or "Sub Organization"?
What are folks opinions about the best way to set such a relationship in Tessitura and what are the pros and cons of your approach?
We don't do much association between organizations so this is mostly just doing the thought exercise.
My personal preference would be to have specific types for each type of relationship. The biggest reason for this is the possibility (especially with government agencies or some educational structures) that you have multiple levels in the umbrella organization. So for instance, looking at a department of education model, you have an elementary school linked to a high school with an association of "Feeder School" and also linked to the school district as "Subsidiary". All of the School districts are associated to the state Department of Education as "District" or something else descriptive.
If you wanted to get really crazy, you could then also associate all of the individual schools to the State org as well.
The upside is that you can get a lot more control in your lists and reporting. The downside is that you will have to have some well documented procedures around which associations to add. But my suspicion is that most organizations only have a handful of people who would actually be making the associations. Everyone else would just need to be informed about the structure so they could correctly use them in lists.
Having a single generic association type seems like you would be sacrificing a lot of descriptive information in favor of simplified data entry. And in this case, the data entry part is not a critical factor as it would be if you were talking about Box Office operators trying to make a sale quickly so they can move on to the next call.
- Levi