VIPs

We use 'Activities' to track attendance at special openings. Is that along the lines of your tracking thinking?

If you are talking about attendance at a performance and you have N-Scan in place, there are several things you can do. You could configure alerts to go out when the ticket is scanned (so a development person knows the VIP has been scanned in for instance).

Even without N-Scan, if you are recording attendance by scanning in ticket stubs, you could run an Attendance by Performance report against a list.

Or...  If you want to update the patron's account in some way, you could build a list to pull all of the VIPs who attended and then use Manage Attributes Utility to update their record with an attribute value.

The notes route always makes me nervous because eventually someone will want a report about the attending VIPs and its very difficult to build a report based on notes.

I can certainly echo Levi's concern about using Notes. We have found it non practical to use Order notes for anything other than recording information used to troubleshoot discrepancies down the road.

Have you looked into the Manage Special Activities utility? You could use that to assign a status of 'Invited' to your list of constituents, then create a dynamic list of people with that status to capture any late additions? After the event, you could have a staff member change the status of the people on the list, from Invited to Attended or No Show.

If the events are regularly ticketed performances you can run the Performance Seating Book report filtered with a list.  Create a list of the VIPs you want to track either with an attribute, constituency or by manually adding to the list.  You can then run the report manually before each show or schedule it to run automatically. 

We have created a VIP constituency that can be used in reports to track attendance.  This list of VIP's is constantly monitored to ensure that any file with the constituency should actually have it.