3 Things You Can Do Now to Prepare for the Tessitura V16 Upgrade
Margaret Stockton
Consultant
We have all been waiting patiently for the Tessitura version 16 upgrade—we have devoured the documentation, listened to the presentations, and perhaps even had a conversation or two about it. It is expected to come out this summer, but there should be a long window for your organization to complete the upgrade. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be taking steps to prepare now! So, as someone who deals A LOT in Tessitura, I thought I’d share some advice on what you can do now to set your organization up for success when v16 launches.
Migrate Your Contact Permissions
The priority item on your preparation list for the upgrade should be migrating your Contact Permissions. You won’t be able to upgrade to v16 without moving the restriction data into Contact Permissions. The ‘Mail Restrictions’, ‘Phone Restrictions’, and ‘E-Market Restrictions’ on the general tab of the Constituent record are being deprecated with v16. As a bonus though, now is your chance to move any of this data you may have stored as attributes as well. Here’s a hot tip: do this first in your test system and make sure you are seeing the data the way you want to see it BEFORE making the updates to your live system.
Assign Membership Benefits
The Membership portion of Tessitura has been completely re-worked in v16 and now includes Benefits. This change is something you can prepare for now while waiting for the upgrade. (As a side note—it is always helpful to review your membership set-up each year to make sure Tessitura agrees with the documentation you send to members).
Take some time to review what benefits you offer your members and create a chart of all the different types of benefits. I recommend including columns for the level(s) they apply to, as well as the type of benefit. In v16 there will be four types of Benefits: Ticketing, Premium, Manually Tracked, and Not Tracked. When you upgrade, you assign the benefits directly to the levels. Your chart will streamline the process of adding Benefits to the appropriate levels.
Update Email Templates
You should review your Email templates yearly. These include your TNew account related emails as well as Confirmation emails which can come from either TNew or Tessitura. Don’t forget to look at the Header and Footers of your emails, make sure all the information is up to date. Starting in v16 you will need to use HTML templates which can be created and managed in Tessitura itself. The HTML Template section lives under Ticketing set-up and includes sample email templates. (Helpful hint to System Administrators: access to the HTML Template area can be controlled in security. You will probably want to limit access to this section.)
If you start with these three steps, when the upgrade announcement is made, you’ll be well on your way to a successful migration. Until then you can go back to patiently waiting…
In Need of Tessitura Support?
At JCA Arts Marketing, our Tessitura experts can fill in the gaps—from season builds and gift tracking to Analytics dashboard development and TNEW. Our consultants can step in on an hourly basis to support your use of Tessitura, as well as provide training to staff as needed.