We (my organization) are about to wrap up our first year in Tessitura. WOO! We've learned a lot about how we use the system for development purposes, and now that we have one year under us I'm MUCH more confident in making decisions about field usage, style, etc. And because we're still in the very early stages of our version's use, I have some time to make changes to how we use fields and functions to optimize our system with minimal intrusion. I'm about to start tackling the annual fiscal year "turnover" and I wanted to pose a question to the group...
What is something you wish you could change about the way your department uses Tessitura for fundraising that would make your work 100x easier/clearer? Maybe it has to do with how analytics pulls in data, maybe it has to do with using one functionality over another, maybe it's a personal data "pet peeve" that you can't solve because of data age/time in the system.
I'm all ears! I'd love to know what wisdom you all can impart as more experienced users while I still have the time and ability to make sweeping system-use changes for next year.
THANKS EVERYONE!! :)
This is a really great question! Are there any areas in particular you feel aren't working as well as you'd like or wish you could use in a more meaningful way?
A few, to be honest. We were mad-dashing to get everything up, and development went live in Tess at least 2-3 months before any of our programs (both ticketing and the education widget). And we're still not in Wordfly, which doesn't help. So I do feel like sometimes there's a disconnect between those functionalities--mainly: CSI's, Putting them in the right place, notifying the right people when things need attention, that sort of thing. And lists for communications purposes--I'm defaulting to setting up lists every time there's a group of people who I want to remember to talk to, but I also feel like that's a compensation tactic for not being in Wordfly? Because we're not in it yet I can't be sure if this is something I should be doing anyway.
On the actual fundraising set-up....
- I really didn't have much mental bandwidth to think about how to use "Appeals" to its max. And I feel like I may have weirdly band-aided that by utilizing campaigns when an appeal would do.
- Again, self-proclaimed facepalm....I didn't have time to put a lot of thought into the "Acknowledgements" section. We just have the standard ack output set up so that the report runs successfully, and then they get some hand-tailoring. Recommendations on how many seem like the right number to use would be awesome. I distinctly remember setting up an offline list in the excel implementation document and getting a "that's way too many" comment during our onboarding training.
- Analytics in general. I'm going to be forcing my Advancement Board Committee to go "cold turkey" on the over-detailed excel reports and lean on analytics outputs moving forward. I have a BUNCH of threads flagged (I'm in the affinity group), but part of me wonders how much of those are dependent on certain functions being set up a specific way. Or if there are any recommendations/lessons learned from others who have been using analytics in this type of reporting, that'd be great too!
So some immediate thoughts:
-For the CSIs (and pretty much everything) I would make sure you've got a good amount of documentation for all Tess users on how these areas work (not just how they work as a whole, but how your org is choosing to use them) as well as a breakdown of who to notify for certain CSI types
-For the communications, are these lists of folks you're sending mass emails to, or just a few folks you want to reach out to? If it's the latter you could set those up as steps under Plans instead of creating lists (that way you'll also get reminders on the Reminders Screen) - By the way, I highly recommend any fundraising folks set up their account so that they Reminders Screen is the first thing they see when logging in
-For acknowledgements, I don't know that there's necessarily a right number, it really depends on the organization. I would think of the hand-tailoring being soon and where different acknowledgement types would be helpful. For example, in our organization we split gifts under $100, gifts $100-$999, and gifts $1K+ into different letter types either because they're signed by a different person ($1k+ is signed by our Managing and Artistic Directors) or they're sent in a different manner (gifts under $100 get emailed acks instead of mailed). Obviously there's always going to be some amount of tweaking, but if there are obvious distinctions between the letters being sent (language, signature, etc.) it makes sense to break it into its own ack. type
-In terms of Analytics, I always like to tell folks just starting out in them to start with the pre-made ones from Tessitura, duplicate them, then go in to edit them. This will show you on the back end how things work. And I always stress that you CAN'T break Analytics or mess anything up because it's just a reporting system, not a utility
In general I think creating documentation (as said above) is SUPER helpful (though time-consuming). Something I did when I needed to leave training information during an extended leave was video myself doing a screen share and going through things (gift entry, acknowledgements, list builds, etc.) which is quicker than writing documentation and allows folks to see things in real time. I also would encourage that you have regular check-ins with other departments about Tessitura use to make sure you all are on the same page about things.
Always happy to talk further through ideas and thoughts (and let's be honest, you have my number )
I cannot stress and +1 enough leaning into Analytics for reporting. We also started our analytics journey taking existing Tessitura reports, and using them as a base to build new ones and tailoring to our needs. I'd also recommend using those excel reports to build out your new dashboards. We had an old EOY campaign excel overview, that I used as a basis to create an appeal success dashboard. Since I already had planned my visuals, it was easy to set up. The more people get into analytics, they'll turn to it more often for pulling their data. It does take a little bit to get comfortable with it, but once they do there is truly no going back.
This is incredibly validating to hear, and I'm glad that you found it easy enough to transition what you were using into Analytics.