Hello Everyone!
At the BSO we currently recording age via date ranges but were thinking about moving towards year-of-birth so that the data will always be accurate. I'm wondering if any other Tessie organizations who define age in terms of year-of-birth XX/XX/XXXX. Is this possible with Tessitura? And if you are using Year-of-birth, how has your success been of collecting the data?
Any guidance you can provide would be much appreciated.
We are also considering a data append to suppliment our current records.
Please share your thoughts,
Jamie Jean
Jamie SchneiderE-Commerce and Digital Marketing ManagerBaltimore Symphony OrchestraPhone: 301.581.5207 | jschneider@BSOmusic.orgJoseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall | 1212 Cathedral St. Baltimore MD 21201 | www.bsomusic.org The Music Center at Strathmore | 5301 Tuckerman Lane North Bethesda, MD 20852 | One world-class orchestra. Two world-class concert halls.
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Hi Jamie,
We collect the full birthdate as an attribute. We've named the attribute 'Birthdate YYYYMMDD' so that users know that that's the format that must be used when inputting this data. when this attribute is added by a customer online it automatically is rendered in this format in Tessitura
We've found it very successful as some of our programs are only available to constituents in certain age categories. One in particular only allows online purchases and the sale is validated by the birthdate (which is verified at ticket pick up time). A nightly job runs to apply appropriate constituencies based on this attribute (i.e. minor...so we don't market to them)
We are not using it very often yet but we have two attributes set up for this.One of "Birthdate DOB" (however I like the MM/DD/YYYY idea) which is a data type of Date forcing us to use the full date and another one of "Birthday-Month/Day" in case we don't know the year.
Jamie,
You mentioned purchasing data and it's certainly possible to get birth date that way although I only remember seeing birth month and birth year coming back from Weath Engine, Epsilon and the like. Maybe that's good enough for your needs or, if your patrons are willing to share their birth date but hesitant to share their birth year, you might purchase and combine the two.
Now, do you believe that New Yorkers age faster than Californians as many suggest?
Warren
We collect this information as an optional field online. Its stored as an attribute. We dont specifically use it at the moment, but I believe there was a thought to email people near their birthday and say "Happy Birthday, come and see this show" etc, so its more of a marketing tool.
Thanks
Mark