Hi Network,
My consortium was looking to add a new constituent type called "Sub-committee" to Tessitura. I wondered if there are any troublesome reports that have hardcoded constituent types that I should watch out for. Or if there are relationships which I should enable once its created.
I guess overall, I'd like to know if anyone has any advice on the safest steps to implement a new constituent type.
Thanks
This would be a group account type?
Yes this would be a group type.
Chris,
Thanks for the heads up I'll check with a TASK ticket to see if thats still the case.
I hate to pile on to the "How do I do this?" "You don't want to do that." thing, but what is the usage case that suggests a new customer type? Is it a search, view, tab that will serve people better if it's a different type? Sometimes the usage need overrides general concerns like this, if rarely.
Is it possible that your purposes would be served by using the "Organization" or "Internal" Customer Type with perhaps a Constituency applied to it (for searches) and a new Affiliation Type ("Sub-committee Member") so that it jumps out on the Relationships tab.
We were planning on creating this new sub-committee type as a way to retain information regarding who was a member of certain subcommitees and for how long. In our case, the Joffrey Boards, among others.
At first when we considered using a "Subcommittee member" Attribute, but Attributes dont retain the duration information of time served.
Then we thought to use a constituency, because it does have start date and end date. However, some of our Board members have served non-consecutive terms, and we are unable to have the same constituency twice, with the two distinct start date and end dates.
So finally we though to use a separate constituent type, "Sub-committee" and have "Member of" relationships to it via affiliations, with start date and end date and inactive. This seemed like the easiest way to encode all of the important information. Then, in List manager, we could select the Joffrey Board sub-committee constituent, and choose to replace it with all affiliates.
I've read of other network members implementing sub-committees/internal committees this way. I figure there can be some pain points in already created reports, so I want to account for them ahead of time.
That makes sense...so you can have multiple affiliations of the same type with the same group? I didn't know that.
Still, it seems you could use Organization or Internal and create a Constituency on the group account of "Subcommittee" and that would be as effective for Lists as creating a new Customer Type.
Aaron,
Just to add another wrinkle, we do track Board Members using Constituency at Tulsa Ballet; the difference is that we build our Constituencies by individual fiscal year. This has the side effect that there isn't a quick glance to see the duration of service in one shot, but we don't get tripped up when somebody has years between terms served.
Thank you,
Brian