My museum has been trying to figure out a way to get our volunteer hours into Tessitura for close to a year (since we went live July 2022). Everyone on the forums keeps saying we need to build a custom screen. A few really great institutions even sent me a zip drive of their SQL files and showed me how to use SQL/SSMS.
The problem is I am so new at this that the little they showed me wasn't enough, and also when I did try to input the SQL files into SSMS, one row had an error message and it's been a pain in the butt to deal with. Another thing is, this set of files needed InfoMaker to complete the process (the PBL file needed to be uploaded there). My institution does not have that, and when I asked via Ticket for it, Tessitura told me no because they are in the process of phasing out InfoMaker.
We are also still running on version 15 and I don't know when we will make the switch to version 16. Also, my institution does not want to spend the money to have the custom screen built, which is why I'm taking the time to try and learn to do it myself.
With all of this in mind, is there something somewhere that will give me a step-by-step as if I'm an idiot (kind of the way Tessitura does when you're first building out the system).
We have a goal of starting to input volunteer hours into Tessitura by July 1 (start of fiscal year and our 1 year anniversary of having Tessitura). If someone could point me in a direction, or maybe if there is a better way of inputting this data, I'd appreciate it.
Hi Chelsea,
I’m wondering if something in the native Bookings/Resource scheduling functionality of Tessitura might help you? https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Help_System/Content/Resource%20Scheduling/Resource%20Scheduling%20Overview.htm
If you set up your volunteers in Tess and add a worker file to their profiles? It might not be the prettiest/smoothest/most elegant way, but it would be all standard functionality with no custom needed. Caveat, I have not tried this myself, so it may totally not meet your needs!
That might work. My only concern would be how do we report on that data later. For grant funding we have to prove x amount of volunteer hours per year.
Our current set-up is to just keep it all in one giant Excel sheet, with different tabs for different months.
In our old system (Altru), we would put the total for each person at the end of the month from the Excel into their constituent record. We could then pull a report on a yearly basis to get how many volunteers we had and how many hours each worked.
So we can absolutely add them as a worker to deal with scheduling them, but we have outside places for that (Google Sheets, Excel, Sling Scheduling App, etc.) What I really need is how to track how many hours each person volunteers for.
It would have to be rewritten once you move to v16, as InfoMaker will not be supported. I'm not sure it makes sense to spend a lot of time getting it set up with InfoMaker as you will have to move to v16 at some point.
Ok. That's what I was afraid of. And v16 doesn't come with something like this already built in, does it?
There are some built in reports you should be able to use - https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Help_System_v151h/Tessitura.htm#Reports/Resource%20Schedules.htm
I've been playing around with Resource Scheduling in our test environment to see how we could use it. I'd be happy to get together for some working sessions to talk through options and setup - we could help each other get to something that makes sense!
This seems to be the best training/overview out there currently - https://www.tessituranetwork.com/en/Items/Videos/Webinars/2017/Resource-Scheduling
No, v16 doesn't have this specifically. But I'll echo what others are saying in that Resource Scheduling could possibly work for you.
My museum already hates the Resource Calendar as it is (we hate a lot of things about Tessitura, but that is one of the biggies), so we are trying to find things that will work that don't involve using it. As far as the reporting, if it only goes by what the volunteer was originally scheduled for, that is not going to work for us. Our volunteers have a little bit of leeway as far as their actual scheduled hours (some of them come and go as they please and their schedule with their supervisor is set as such), and also (especially with our docents) they will swap with each other last minute, and we won't know until they walk up to the front desk and say "Hi I'm here replacing so and so."
So we need something with a little more wiggle room where I can manually enter number of hours after the fact.