[smoore]

My organization is interested in having a "master" calendar that will track all activities including events, appeals (mailing dates), exhibit starting and ending dates and all other activities that need to be made known to the employees as a whole.

We currently have 33 staff members which includes development, membership, curators, administration, education, operations, marketing and finance.

We also rent our facility for private functions such as weddings and rentals to other organizations as well as having our own eduational events.

I have been challenged to utilize RE to make this happen. Has anyone been successful with this in an arts based organization?

Thanks,
Stacey

P.S. I know I can track events and event actions with having the events module. I guess I am looking more for how to track the peripheral information.

[Melissa Siobhan]

I highly suggest you use another software. Raiser's Edge is strictly fundraising software and trying to make it calendar software will likely bring you more headache than you want.

[Matthew]

I disagree somewhat with Melissa. For organizations who RE as the database of record for institutional memory, everything you mentioned can be stored in an organized fashion within RE without major workarounds. You can create actions on Appeals to track mailing dates, Actions on Constituents to track Many things, and Actions on events to track event planning and mailing items.

There are 2 ways to go about reporting on it The easiest but least customizable is to use the calendar feature. From the main menu in Raiser's Edge, choose View--Calendar. It will display actions and events.

The 2nd way, and probably the best solution is to create custom report in Crystal. Unless you could pull the data with SQL through the back-end you would need to use a single RE-generated export... I would suggest an Action export because you can use all types of actions. This would mean that there would need to be an action for every item you want to display on the calendar.