Our organization has been using Tessitura for 10 years, and we have started to perform a CRM audit this year to increase efficiency of our data flow, review current processes and retrain staff. One of the things we want to revisit is the structure of where transactional data lives (Household), and where we store email addresses and web logins (Individual). We chose to put emails on the individual level, so we can manage communication preferences on an individual level. We often run into situations where we need to extract transactional information, and email addresses for a project. For example, this year we needed to extract On Account (Event Credit) amounts (Household) and email addresses (Individual) to send a communication for season launch. How have others managed these communication projects without having to do a lot of manual data clean up? What are the pros and cons of putting email addresses on the Household level?
Chances are you'll wind up with individual emails on households and crossed affiliates, especially if your patrons can enter and update on the web. Most orgs I've worked with (mostly in consortium) send to HH and affiliated individuals except for very targeted purposes. Our consortium has artifact data going back over multiple imports and versions of Tessitura, and there's never been resources and/or enthusiasm in the way of audits and cleanups especially in light of much shared data that requires everyone to agree on all details.
For review, you can use the output elements in the recipe here, maybe also for targeted comms depending on your processes.
https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Help_System/Tessitura.htm#Recipe%20Books/Output%20Sets/Affiliate%20Phone%20and%20Email.htm
John, thank you for that output set recipe tip. We're going to try this and see if this takes care of our business use cases we have. I appreciate your response.
SLSO is in a similar situation with no real solution. Philanthropy wants to email an invitation to the household based on household transactional data, but the emails live at the individual level, and my coworkers DON'T want to send the invitation to both A1 & A2. They want one invitation going to each household. If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them.
Ashley Elliott
Database Administrator
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
314-286-4198
ashleye@slso.org
I like this! Even though it doesn't solve the problem I listed below, I am going to set it up because it could be valuable in other situations.
Ashley
I have not done this myself, but could you not essentially create a custom view that essentially selects the top 1 e-mail address per household, and then build a custom output set element based on that?