Angela Hodges

Advancement Services Manager, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Empowering fundraisers at Crystal Bridges Museum

6/13/2017

4 min

Implementation is very rewarding.

The people beside us on the Tessitura team were just incredible. They guided us, but they allowed us also to make the business decisions that we needed to make, in that we needed to decide about business process. We needed to decide about the actual setup of the database, but they gave us the tools to do that.

Member Cards

We were able to actually add in an acknowledgement onto each one of our records that came over so that we could reprint our member cards for people who needed an additional member card or had lost theirs. The programmer was able to make that work for us. It's a pretty fantastic tool that we're able to do that flawlessly, just as if we had originally booked the membership in Tessitura. It works wonderfully.

Photo courtesy of Crystal Bridges

Powerful Fundraising Tools

Our development team now has an adequate moves management system. We didn't have that before. They were using actions and notes in Raiser’s Edge. We had no visibility. They were putting spreadsheets together of next steps, and it was a mess, an absolute mess. And so now in Tessitura, with all of that information, we've started creating plans. People have portfolios and they're able to see what their next steps are. We're able to manage a lot of our renewal process, that we were using on an Excel spreadsheet, for a lot of our higher-level members. We're using plans for that now so that we can trigger the principal to write a letter or send an email, or what have you. So it's pretty awesome.

Photo courtesy of Crystal Bridges

Empowering Development Officers

I think that those tools specifically help our development officers to really know where they left off with the donor, and that gives our donors a more personalized experience. We're able to call and say, "I remembered that we just talked about X, Y, or Z and wanted to follow up with you." And so for the donor, that makes them feel important and special and really catered to, and that makes all the difference.

Full View of Each Patron

For Crystal Bridges, it's pretty incredible that we are able to see not only ticketing information for our patrons, but also the development side of things. So we're able to see specifically what donor's coming to what event, as well as where we left off with our donors. So, moves management, what are our next steps, what was our last conversation with them, flagging people for a follow up, we just have never had those kind of tools. The capability there is incredible.

Providing Member Benefits Online

TNEW is incredibly more reliable than our previous ticketing system. So when our donors log in, they're able to automatically receive their member benefits. We've never been able to offer that before. [Previously] It was an honor system and so if I logged on to the website and I wasn't a member, I could just select the member pricing and no one would ever question that. So now we're able to actually offer our members that exclusive pricing that we weren't able to really define before.

We just recently rolled out a members-exclusive window to buy tickets, so they're going to have two days extra in front of the public to purchase tickets for this upcoming event, and I think it's going to be pretty awesome for them.

Topics

Fundraising

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BI & Analytics

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Memberships