Hello All,
I have finally gotten the question that I have anticipated for a while now from our Development department: "Does Tessitura have any type of interaction with our Outlook e-mail so that e-mails to donors [we] may send would be documented in Tessitura?"
The obvious thought to this would be to find some way to link these e-mails with Plans/Steps in some way. Just wondering if anyone has done such a thing and, if so, what it might involve. I know that different Outlook integrations have been tried for Tessitura, but I am not aware of anything that would go quite to this level. And my experience in such areas is, shall we say, less than comprehensive (much less).
Also, just in general, attempting to make headway in this direction I do think would be beneficial for a number of organizations.
Any and all thoughts welcome. Thanks!
John
Are you not using some sort of email campaign engine? Are you managing distribution groups for patrons in your organization outlook or is this more one off stuff? I feel like this could be done using Microsoft Dynamic 365/Sharepoint.
Oh, this is 100% person to person communication. We absolutely use Wordfly for any sort of mass e-mails for Marketing and Development. Our Development department though wants to find a way to integrate phone calls and e-mails though so that they do not have to type up a plan step for every e-mail they send but just have one created automatically. Because "salesforce can do that". One of our newer employees used their software in the past, so that is what prompted the question. It is also on the minds of our employees as Salesforce also happened to move into and rename one of the biggest buildings downtown Indianapolis in the last two years. Like I said, I was pretty sure this question has been bubbling for a while.
I admit to not necessarily expecting a solution at this moment. As I said though, I do certainly think that such a thing would be a solid idea and is worth exploring.
I think I am going to look into setting up a connection (tessitura rest api) in Dynamic. If that works, I would think I could build a custom app and do some sort of logging. Gives me a side project and it would be a simple solution for companies already on 365.
Hi, John -- we're in the VERY early stages of exploring Tessitura integrations via Zapier, which would then connect us to Office 365 and other services, such as Formstack and SurveyMonkey. This will require opening up the Tessitura REST API to the world, which is something we're looking at in terms of hardening and locking down. More to come as we explore.
Well, I am certainly not going to ask you to stop. For obvious reasons, I expect nothing of you, but certainly would love to see anything that you figure out in the meantime.
Hi John-- Great question on this Outlook integration front. We have had several inquiries about this going way back in Tessitura history and in fact, some of you may recall we had a Tessitura Outlook plug-in some years ago that did much of what you described. However, natural evolution in our RAMP hosting environment passed the plug-in architecture approach we had used to build it and we made the decision to unplug it (pardon the pun) because it was not widely used at the time. But more recently, we have heard a resurgence again and I've noted this for product consideration as we move forward. Thanks for surfacing a useful case.
Would it be possible to BCC an email to a captive account?
And then run a Zapier or other batch job to look for new email messages in the account your BCCed to.
And then Lookup up the Tessitura Account with the To: Email Address out of the email.
You would use that email address to find a customer number over the REST API.
And then Dump the research note over the REST API into the Research notes area of the account with that email address?
This might not require opening up firewalls (if you run the job on-premises) and It seems like it would get the job done?
Greetings, Tom! That certainly would be possible — with that said, the point of this exploration is to actually open up the REST API to the world. The immediate use case is a Formstack or Survey Monkey form that can actually create constituents or update email preferences directly.
Having given this some more thought, though, it occurs to me that I can do all of this through a data gateway leveraging Microsoft Flow — that wouldn’t require opening the firewall and is very secure.
DGomez
Kristin,
Thanks for your response! That is great to hear, and certainly I do understand how these things can go in and out as time passes.
All intriguing ideas. And you seem to have more experience in this area than I do, so I shall stay out of your way for now.