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,
A quick thought rather than building something brand new for this -- we've used plans in the past as a way for tracking our interns.
Plans allow the tracking of status and several value fields (in dollars, but you could use it for hours if you wanted) for each plan attached to an individual account, as well as multiple tasks (steps) per plan.There is also batch add/update functionality native to Tessi, and the Plan Summary Report can save a flat csv for monthly and final reporting. Essentially plans are a CRM task management system disguised as a fundraising tool!
Sky
That might not be a bad idea. Could you explain a little more about how the data would get put in? Where does Plans live in Tessitura?
Plans are under the History tab in Tessitura. You can bulk add/update plans to records using the Plans Manager which allows you to add or change all of the parameters on multiple plans, add steps, and update the associated workers. There are a bunch of helpful videos on the Tessi network site about plans and plans management, which you can find here -- https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Support/Training/Intro-Courses/Intro-to-Fundraising/Moves-Management. (n.b. these videos are aimed at fundraisers but if you think of volunteers as donating their time rather than money the same sorts of ideas would apply!)