- Cross posting this on a few forums -
Hi everyone!
Looking for some thoughts/resources about how other organizations manage their external data?
The short background is that we want to centralize all the various 'data' about our programming that exists *outside* of Tessitura (that doesn't necessarily need to be *in* Tessitura).
For example, we hold classroom workshops and need to keep track of number of students in each workshop; the county of the school, etc. It's a bit excessive to book these one-time workshops into Tessitura, so our Education team keeps all the information in our shared drives alongside the rest of the planning for the workshop itself.
Are there any tools or tips you have for how you and/or your organization tracks and manages this type of data?
I'm considering a mix of something like a sitemap that connects to where the departments are already doing their own tracking in our shared drives plus starting some summary excel sheets to keep readily available.
As an organization we're trying to expand the 'database manager' position to be more of general data management - has anyone else done this/is this how your organization is structured?
Any suggestions are appreciated!
We have a similar program at SCT and only book the payments in Tess for the same reason you mentioned. We keep all of the details in a shared spreadsheet in Microsoft Teams/sharepoint. There's one tab that houses all of the data and then other tabs that summarize the data for reporting, as well as an invoice tab where they can enter an order number and it creates a nice invoice to send the school. I am the data operations manager at our org and I did set these up for them (with a lot of help from my husband who is much better at Excel than I am).
Hi Ashleigh. We too have alot of our Creative Learning activity happen outside of Tessitura and had previously used spreadsheets. However, a couple of years ago we decided to use Special Activities to enter the info into tessitura so that activity is held against constituent records for either an individual (e.g. doing work experience) or for a company holding a workshop for schools etc. We use it to track the number of attendees, time/date and notes about the activity. It might not work for you if you use Activities for anything else but we arent (at the moment) so it works for us. We then just use the Patron Activity Report as and when we need to pull off a spreadsheet.
we do the same! You can flex the fields of special activities to meet your needs as well... for instance, we put dollar amounts of artists' project grant awards in the attendees' field. The patron activity report will give you a sum of "attendees" aka the awarded amount for the program. a bonus of the patron activity report is the membership level, which can be cool to see which members are participating in those things.
also should mention that if you can create a list of constituents that need activities, the manage special activities utility will allow you to add them all at once, which saves some time, potentially.
Hey Ashleigh,
I was part of a showcase on Education data in 2018. Arts Centre Melbourme were up after me and showcased how they how they went from their "Spreadsheet of Doom" for tracking their workshops, to creating a tidy system table that is accessible to the team and contains all the date entered for easy extraction..i can dig out the presentation slides of you like.
Oh I definitely want to see that slide presentation. We have a lot of doom spreadsheets too.
It can save you a lot of hassle as with a little mapping you can reference established data in interesting ways. I'll dig it up in the morning
I'd love to see those slides as well! Echoing the Spreadsheets of Doom over here too!!
I hadn't even thought of Activities! This might do the trick!
A follow up for you and Lianna Macari -
who inputs that information into Tessitura? Is it the staff member running the program (like an Education Program Manager) or does it fall to the database administrator? A lot of our Education Team members don't use Tessitura at all, so I can't decide if it's worth the trouble to train them on inputting this data if that's the only thing they're doing in Tess....
I would love to see those slides too. Such a great idea.
Jena