Blog

5 Simple Ways to Better Leverage Your RMA

July 05, 2017

1) Check the source data

Sometimes you run a report, and—even if you can’t put your finger on it—it just doesn’t look right. Nine out of ten times, the culprit is a rogue performance that doesn’t belong in your filters. In just a couple of clicks you can review the filters in detail and check to see if anything stands out.


On the top ribbon, click View > Source Data

 Tip: Sorting performances by seats sold is a great way to catch cancelled performances.

2) Spare the repetition: save your filters

This is especially handy if find yourself using more than one filter to get a grouping of performances just right and want to see that same filter across a few reports. Rather than adding your parameters from scratch each time, save your filter and then load it in any other report in RMA.


Choose “Save Filter” on any report, and then “Load Filter” on any other

 Tip: Creating some generic filters can also make creating reports faster, and serve as a good template for creating new filters.

3) Unclutter your saved reports with folders (and even subfolders)

Your saved RMA reports can get quickly out of hand—as we start to lose track of which reports we’ve created, we create duplicates, and the situation snowballs until the Shared Reports section of RMA looks like an episode of “Hoarders.”

Routinely cleaning up your reports is a great practice, but creating folders to organize your reports will go a long way to helping your whole team find the reports they need.


Right click the white space to create a new folder; simply drag and drop reports to move them around.

Tip: Consider organizing reports by program, purpose, or even user.

4) Use the “Maturation” filter

An underused filter just waiting to be leveraged is called “Maturation,” and lets you easily focus on just performances in the future (good for your dashboard), or just performances in the past (good for income reports).


Simply uncheck “complete” if you only want to look at upcoming shows

5) Start sorting your Dashboard

The Monitoring Dashboard is undeniably the most used report in RMA. Sometimes a chronological ordering of performances is what we need, but how else you might want to view your dashboard?

Using the little arrows by each of your selected dashboard elements, you can sort by such measures as income, sales with target, or % capacity sold/rsvd. A great trick is to add the “Days Since Price Change” element so you can focus on performances that have not enjoyed any price adjustments.


JCA Arts Marketing collaborates with cultural organizations to increase revenue, boost attendance and membership, and grow patron loyalty. We provide consulting and software services to hundreds of cultural institutions across multiple genres, including dance, museums, opera, performing arts centers, symphony, and theatre. We can help you achieve your marketing goals.


Timmy Metzner, Senior Consultant