Ask Me Anything: How can we manage Tessitura more easily while we’re short staffed?
Margaret Stockton
Consultant
Help, we are short staffed! What can we do to make Tessitura management easier until we can staff up fully?
Everything has changed over the past eighteen months. The pandemic forced organizations to make hard choices, and often they were of the personnel variety. Now that re-opening is here, the show must go on. For some, this is happening before organizations can be fully staffed-up.
There are tools at your fingertips to help, and it is time to consider Tessitura as an additional employee. For example, Tessitura contains many reports and utilities that can be scheduled to perform tasks, or at least automate parts of an organization’s daily tasks.
Automate Reports & Acknowledgement Letters
To start, what reports do you run daily in your department and email out to the staff? They can be scheduled so that they arrive bright and early to their inboxes. The output is not limited to just pdf documents. You can send excel and .csv files as well. This is perfect for acknowledgement letters. Create a schedule for each letter and have the output sent. The data in these spreadsheets can then be merged into your acknowledgements.
If you use TNEW, you can add acknowledgement data to the email confirmations via the TR_TNEW_DYN_EMAIL_CONTENT table. This will ensure that the proper tax language is added for online donations. You can add your COVID attendance language to this table and have it appear on all ticket confirmations. No need to re-write your email templates. If multiple items are in the cart that have qualifying email content, they will all be added to your email confirmations.
Process Gifts Directly into Funds
There has been a rise in online donations and many organizations are still using On-Account payment methods for these, so development staff has to process the gifts manually. It might be time to consider having TNEW and Tessitura process these gifts directly into funds instead. This will help ease gift processing time and acknowledgements. For easy review of daily gifts, set up the ‘New Contributions Report’ to run every morning, for the previous day. If something is off the gift can be adjusted—just remember that it has to be adjusted starting in a ticketing batch.
Use the “Product Creation Utility” to Set Up Performances and Admissions
Performance and Admission set up requests are coming fast and furiously right now. There is a tool for you to use for this as well: The Product Creation Utility. This is located in the Season Manager section of Tessitura. It might not be appropriate for all performance creation, but it can be a time saver. Creating a template document to be filled out for performance/admission creation is also helpful. What data does the person need to create, and in what order, include it all. It can be used to proof the builds as well.
Use Pricing Rules to Automate Price Changes
Pricing Rules are another tool in your belt. They can be used online or in the application to communicate information or change prices, triggered by constituencies, number of tickets, or source codes.
Now that you have your additional employee, Tessitura, up to speed, you should have space to breathe and know that we are all in this together.
If you need additional help beyond these tips, we’re here for you. We’ve been helping nonprofits with Tessitura and marketing support throughout the pandemic. Learn more about Interim Staffing and start a conversation with us about supporting your team.