Hello all!
We're all fairly new to Tessitura at the James Museum and we just found out that this group (and groups in general) exist.
We were wondering if anyone out there could shed some insight on recommended practices for Campaign, Appeal, and Source structure in a Museum, Zoo, Aquarium setting.
I can share our current setup for you if it can help. Thank you all in advance!
Welcome!
Campaigns, appeals and sources are going to vary depending on your reporting needs and what purpose you want them to serve.
If you're not sure what sorts or reporting you're going to do yet, start simple. I find that the main differences in purpose are between Marketing, Membership, Development and Ticketing.
Here at Shedd Aquarium, Development relies heavily on campaigns for reporting so they break campaigns down by Membership and Contributions for each fiscal year plus a few evergreen ones for endowment and capital campaigns. Then within the Contributions campaign they use funds to sort out where the money goes.
Membership relies more on the appeals because they are using the sources within to track different mailings and promotions. Membership has one Campaign each year and then a poodle-ton of appeals and sources within those.
Ticketing has so many other ways to track/segment data and we're not currently using sources/promo codes, so we stick to one evergreen generic Marketing campaign for ticketing, which is different from most places I've seen which at least create a new one for each fiscal year. But I'm loving this because the staff don't have to learn new source numbers each year for order entry, and it's less maintenance for me once the FY ends so that I don't have to change our web source in t_defaults, update utilities, etc. I might need to change this practice once we start using promo codes for ticketing though.
You can ALWAYS add more, but it's tricky to consolidate once you have too many. I'd say start with something like an annual Membership, Contribution and Marketing Campaign and an evergreen Ticketing Campaign and then expand as you find that you want to use them to further segment data or track things.
Others may be quite different though, especially if marketing is more involved in ticketing.
Ha, jinx Greg! Greg there can give you way more info on the way development uses ours.