Hello! I'm not sure what I'm asking is possible, so I figured some great mind in the community might be able to help me figure it out.
The ballet academy branch of our company uses a different database for students, tuition, schedules, etc. We are wanting to find the parents of academy students in Tessitura and give them a constituency to signify them as academy parents. Unfortunately because they use a different database, I do not have ID numbers for each constituent, only their name, address, email, and phone number.
Is there anyway for Tessitura to find these constituents without their ID to make a list for a constituency update, or will it need to be done manually one by one by searching their info?
In theory a properly configured Constituent Import would be able to match most customer records, and simultaneously apply a defined Constituency. There's a bit of setup for that, so you'd want to know how many records you were talking about to assess the time cost either way.
It's roughly 600 records to import. Is the bit of setup for running the Constituent Import utility or is there more back end to be done?
Okay, I haven't done this in ages, and not for this purpose, and it looks like it's a bit more tricky than I though...I think it's the Order/Contribution Import which try to match new information to existing Constituents.
https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Help_System_v151h/Tessitura.htm#Constituent%20Import/Constituent%20Import.htm
With the Const Import you have the option to create or skip duplicates. Maybe you could use the utility to create new records where they are not in your Tessitura database, and then use the duplicate error output to create a list?
I've done constituent import more recently. I usually begin by making a query list using eaddresses, and tend that list of already in the system manually. Follow up with just the ones not found by eaddress. Out of the box, Constituent import just matches on name and postal address. Eaddress is more distinctive. Agree with the comments about introducing a crossover ID using maybe an attribute for the unique ID in the other database, but eaddresses tend to mostly be unique to non-dupe accounts. DETAILS I use excel to create the ,'emailaddress' for a list manager list like the following. I fill down ,' to the left of eaddresses and ' to the right, then concatenate and paste into a list. NOTE, if you're on Office365, the first ' requires '' to render.
SELECT DISTINCT a.customer_no FROM V_CUSTOMER_WITH_PRIMARY_GROUP AS a WITH (NOLOCK) INNER JOIN (SELECT a1.customer_no FROM vs_eaddress AS a1 WITH (NOLOCK) WHERE a1.address in ( 'huffer@gmail.com' ,'puffer@yahoo.com' ,'blower@outlook.com' ) -- and ISNULL(a1.inactive, 'N') IN ('N') ) AS e ON e.customer_no = a.customer_no WHERE a.inactive = 1
Clarifying, that the ' in front fo the first eaddress required two apostrophes in Office365 (not quotation mark), and likewise the following apostrophe. Comma apostrophe ,' doesn't require two apostrophes. Also 600 eaddresses could over run the listmanager 4k character limit, so you might have to break your 600 parent eaddresses into multiple copies of the list with a distinct group of eaddresses in each. We run Constituent Import for our academy parents periodically and assign an attribute, but don't make any effort beyond name and eaddress to join the separate databases. But we do it only after all the performances where caretakers get tickets, so the attribute typically goes in during that process.
Where we really benefited from this process, though, was while we were using Eventbrite to sell streaming tickets during the pandemic. Constituent import can be quite cranky, and being able to query in listmanager on emails was a huge time savings.