Hello Everyone - I was wondering how some of your deal with guest lists for events. With the Tessitura System I have been told that the person needs to be created as a constituent and a point of contact (i.e. email or phone) is needed. Is there a way around this that anyone has figured out? For example, if you have an outside organization that has a 20 person guest list to an event of a capacity of 400 you want those tickets to be in the system not just on a list so ticketing representatives can access the orders without referencing a separate list. Any suggestions on how to work around this and what the rest of you do for guest lists?
Chantel Feola
House Manager of Public Programs
Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Tessitura can be configured to require nothing but a name for a new constituent -- any requirements of contact information is probably a business or data sanity rule. The only way to have a name reference an order is with a real constituent record assigned as the owner, initiator, or ticket recipient. Other possibilities like name/aliases or attributes for guest lists would just be workarounds and would probably not work very well.
We just did a big gala event where every ticket was sold in a group of 10 or 20, and individual names were assigned as recipients, which printed on tickets. Whenever we had a recipient without an existing constituent record, we would simply create one with the name only.
If you do go this route, you will need to change the setting that requires contact information, meaning that it will fall upon your staff to remember to require this information of new constituents. This might mean extra training. If these large groups are infrequent enough, a workaround could be to change the setting for only as long as it takes you to assign the recipient names, and then change back so that the requirement is enforced going forward.