TTT June 25, 2020

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1. Importing Existing Patrons to a Mail List

There are times when a group of patrons from the Theatre Manager database may need to be exported and imported back into Theatre Manager in order to create a new mail list. Some reasons you may want to do this could be:

  • to recover an old Mail List that was deleted accidentally -or-
  • when an excel document containing patron numbers is manipulated in some way to further identify patrons (eg. donors where their 6 year trend shows each years’ donations increased by 10% every year) -or-
  • a list of people is passed to another department for selection for marketing purposes or to have their content altered in some way

For more information on how to prepare the list of patrons and do the import, please check out our help page on this topic.

2. What is a Donation Program Year

Theatre Manager can help you build your Donor Recognition for a PlayBill using various criteria such as donation dates, fiscal year, and/or campaign. Each donation has a field called Program Year if you like to segment donation in an arbitrary way like ‘season’ - which may or may not follow fiscal year. Example: the donation was made for the 2020-21 season, aka. 2020-21 program year (for the playbill).

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3. Setting a Default Program Year for a Campaign

Program Years are helpful to extract all donations for specific Program Year, like 2020 or when entering a multi year pledge.

Here’s an example of the multi year pledge of $3000 over 3 years entry

$ 1000 Donation (year 1)

  • Date: July 10 2020
  • Fiscal Year: 2020
  • Program Year: 2021

$1000 Donation (year 2)

  • Date: July 10 2021
  • Fiscal Year: 2021
  • Program Year: 2022

$1000 Donation (year 3)

  • Date: July 10 2022
  • Fiscal Year: 2022
  • Program Year: 2023

A Donation Campaign can be setup with a default Program Year. This allows the campaign to be set with a specific Program Year in advance of or behind the current year. An example for this might be for subscription donations are set for the NEXT Program Year.

If the Program Year is left blank in the campaign setup, it records as the same year the donation is given when a new donation is entered on the patron’s record.

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(Watch next week for using Program Year in the PlayBill.)