July PatronManager Certified Admin of the Month

July 8, 2019

Our PatronManager Certified Admin of the Month for July is Araina Eber, Director of Guest Services at Thrasher-Horne Center in Orange Park, Florida.

We asked Araina some questions about her journey and current role as a PatronManager Administrator at her organization. Here is what she shared with us:

1. What is your favorite PatronManager feature?

It’s hard to choose, but one of my favorite features would have to be Email Templates (pre-written messages that can be sent to a particular contact), which we use to send customized messages to various segments of our audience, as well as invoices to vendors!

2. What is one feature of PatronManager you were not aware of until you became a Certified Admin?

Data Loader (a Salesforce application that automates the importing, exporting, and deleting of records). It has saved us a lot of time, specifically by automating the once manual process of updating addresses in our system!

3. Has becoming a Certified Admin improved your ability to mentor and teach PatronManager to your colleagues?

Yes! I feel that every supervisor must earn the respect of those under them, and the best way to do that is to show them you know what you’re talking about. With the knowledge I’ve acquired from becoming a Certified Admin, I am able to answer every question they have and implement ideas they suggest in our system.

4. What have you accomplished since becoming an Admin that you are most proud of? Are there any unique PatronManager customizations that you have created as an Admin that you would like to pass on?

One of my favorite accomplishments was adding new fields in PatronManager for our volunteer point system! We use the Volunteers for Salesforce app to manage our volunteers, but prior to my customization, there was no way to record the points each volunteer earned when working an event (they can cash these points in for tickets to shows). I added fields for total hours worked, total points earned, points redeemed, and points remaining. With these new fields added, our volunteers are now easily able to see how many points they have at any point, and anyone on my staff can help them cash points in without needing to look at an excel sheet!

5. Which one of your organization’s events are you most excited about this year? (If you had to pick one…)

We have so many great events coming up this season and it is really difficult to pick just one, but I think the event I am most excited about is “Muddfest” in September. It is the first time we have curated an event like this — 5 rock bands in one night. It is sure to be a very long and tiring night for our staff with over 4 hours of music, but we are hoping to bring new guests in and show them why they should keep coming back!

6. What is one of your goals for 2019?

My goal for 2019 is to increase the use of PatronManager throughout my organization!

7. What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Spending time with my family.

8. What is your favorite vacation spot?

It has been a very long time since I’ve been there, but Sicily would be my favorite.

9. What additional resources have you discovered since becoming Certified that have benefited your organization?

The Client Community is one of my greatest resources. We started working on a new custom section in PatronManager to track information about specific events (such as run time, date, merchandise, staffing, and special requests), and we found that the process of manually pulling data from event records was very time-consuming. I reached out to the Community to see if we were missing something. Allie Tabberer, PatronManager’s Documentation Specialist, and Joe Gleason, Assistant Executive Director at Capitol Center for the Arts, were great in offering some suggestions on formulas to help automate this.

10. What is your most treasured possession?

My son, though he is not a possession, is the most important thing to me.

July PatronManager Certified Admin of the Month

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