Involvements are a key to unlocking the potential of Maestro. As we have described them before, they are essentially custom fields or custom tags that you can put on any contact, business, or property. They allow you to ditch all the spreadsheets by tracking everything about a person, company, or building.
Before we get into some of our favorite involvements, let’s talk about how you should setup your involvements. For most involvements we recommend using the following setup:
Name: Board of Directors
Date: 2021
Note: President
Setting them up this way allows you to use the same Involvement, in this case Board of Directors, year after year. This also gives you the best results for reporting as you will be able to generate a list of everyone with that tag (everyone who has ever been on the board), or a specific year (2021).
There are a few instances where you may want to add the year to the name. We have some farmers markets, for example, that track their membership through Maestro and they use the involvement like this:
Name: 2021 Farmers Market
Date: 3/7 or March 7
Reporting like this allows them to generate a list of everyone that has been at the market in 2021 or is there on a specific date.
*It is worth noting that most of these communities also have an additional involvement for “Farmers Market Vendor” or something similar so that they can get everyone who has been to the market and not just in a specific year.
Now that we’ve covered that, let’s talk about things that you can, and should be tracking through involvements in Maestro.
In contacts, there are a number of demographic “tags” that you are likely missing. Think about reporting or lists you may want to generate down the road when creating these. For example, if you are tracking your Farmers Market vendors through Maestro, are you tracking what they sell? You could have this setup:
Name: Farmers Market Vendor
Date: Sweet Corn (or vegetables, etc)
If you remember the Onboarding courses, you’ll remember that the “Date” field is actually an open text field so you do not have to enter a date there, you can actually enter any text. This adds even more flexibility to what you are able to track through these involvements. Here’s a few of our favorite involvements:
We also recommend having an involvement so that you can identify people who may make good board members, etc. in the future.
In businesses, the demographic tags are again an important and often overlooked involvement. Having involvements such as “Asian owned”, or “Female Owned” will give you opportunity to not only quickly generate a list of businesses that meet that criteria but also give you a chance to see what percentage of your businesses fit those segments. This gives you more knowledge and more talking points when you are recruiting and helps you ensure that your district is representing everyone in your community.
In properties, of course those same demographic involvements can provide some excellent data. There are also some great involvements that can be very helpful from both a Design and an Economic Vitality standpoint. Think about involvements such as:
Having this type of information at your fingertips will make your district that much stronger. It will give you even more tools to promote and grow your district. We encourage you to implement these involvements soon. Create a plan for going door to door to ask questions and engage with your businesses. It will always be time well spent.
