Customization of TNEW regarding Registrations of children's camps and programs

Hi Michelle,

We do use TNEW for sign-ups to some of our educational events (typically lectures for grownups connected to our performances).  This is done without customization: just using Auxiliary Performances.  If you're just looking for simple inventory management and roster lists that's likely sufficient.  We have a more complicated  request in for scheduling attendance for school groups which can not be covered by Auxiliary Performances, but are still trying to work up a specification for that.

The one caution I have is that you'll want to be sensitive in how information gathered on minors is stored: they'll need to be flagged in some way so as to not be available to more internal users than necessary, and to be sure they are never accidentally swept up in marketing campaigns and the like.

--Gawain

When I worked for the Gilmore Keyboard Festival, our consortium used Tessitura Consulting Services' for the Education customization. The Gilmore used it for Piano Lab and KeysFest registrations, but didn't use it for Piano Camp as those registrations came through the YMCA where we held the camp. Now that I'm with Cincinnati Ballet we're looking at options for customizing TNEW for our Academy registrations. Unfortunately, we don't have the budget to use Tessitura Consulting Services here, so I'm really interested in anyone who built something internally and would be open to sharing what they did.

Best of luck!
Sara

Hi Michelle,

We use the auxiliary forms as well, capture the information as a CSI (that works better for our consortium so that different organizations can ask subsets of all questions for the form, but a stored procedure would work too), and then we have a background script that parses the info from the CSI and puts it in the appropriate places on the child's and patron's records.

I participated in a session on this subject at TLCC this past summer, so you might want to search the Conference archives for different approaches. The customizations for this type of thing run the gamut, and you can keep it fairly simple all the way to having TNEW build something for you.

Good luck!

~Katie

I'm with Sara in wondering how others have managed with low resources

and with Gawain emphasizing the sensitive nature of minor's data. 

I have a background with a children's museum and brought a lot of awareness of the sensitivity of minor's data with me to Dallas Black Dance Theatre's Academy. Since I've been with DBDT, we scrupulously avoid creating separate accounts for minors due to so many rules that must be followed to segregate their information;  e.g. impossible to hide the general tab stuff in our consortium environment, and even a name in the system with our constituency could put a child at risk. The likelihood may be low, but the risk is high.  

We've made several stabs at getting custom screen(s), putting the minor's info on caretaker's account, to a consortium-agreed set of basic components with no success, either, This is not necessarily a failure of Tessitura, but more like a weakness when different orgs have different priorities.  Every org in our consortium that currently deals with minors has found their own work-around, so there's not a lot of demand for a consortium solution.  So my organization has, for now at least, settled with an outside vendor for class and workshop registrations. From there, we import caretaker basic info using an out of the box utility.  This is not ideal, but it's better than nothing, and it's definitely better the potential of a catastrophic leak of sensitive data through a box office or other non-specialized Tessitura user. 

Good evening Michelle,

Our consortium worked with Tessitura's consulting team to create a customization in TNEW which actually creates child records to be added onto a household account (if the child is not already present) or allows the person transacting on TNEW to select an existing child to be the recipient of a class purchase.

The biggest issues we have with it presently are that it's not 100% "feature-parity" to TNEW's custom form data (the most glaring example being that you can't have multi-select checkboxes) and that when we did the customization, we neglected to request reporting work so that we would have custom reports ready to go. As a result, a lot of the reporting has to be accomplished via customizing Output Set Elements (which we've been doing in-house).

We are just about to start the process of trying to get a better reporting solution and seeing whether or not we can get that "feature-parity" with vanilla TNEW functionality. I don't want to state an actual cost here in the forums, but it has been rather pricey between the initial customization work and then ongoing consulting time to try and build reports on our own.

Thank you,

Brian