Hey Melissa, here are a few recommendations:

• Ensure your code tables in RE are spotless before doing the integration.  The big ones are address types, states, solicit codes, titles and suffixes.  PE is great at ticketing but doesn't have some of the advanced CRM features of RE (like global change), so you'll want to take care of this ahead of time.
• Make sure constituents don't have multiple addresses of the same type; only the first one will integrate.
• PE doesn't have the concept of 'deceased', so if this information is important to the guest services folks, consider globally adding it as a constituent code.
• If your memberships are always associated with gifts, set up default gift details on your membership categories and turn on the RE business rule to auto-create gifts when adding a membership.
• PE has features to give membership benefits like free admission or merchandise discounts. If a constituent has two current memberships (according to the start/end dates), he will be eligible for two sets of benefits until one expires. There is a business rule in RE to auto-set the start date on renewals to the end date of the current membership; use it to allow early renewals and avoid this situation without having to train users to change start dates.
• Subscribe to The Spotlight blog! It's always up-to-date with information on patches and new features, tips and tricks, industry news, and best practices. There's also the occasional free custom report or PEO add-on.
  

Hi Melissa

Oh boy! I don't envy you at all.  We also sell memberships, tickets, book field trips, and take donations.  We have about 20,000 active member households and about a million visitors annually.  From a membership perspective, we've had some real challenges with the PE/RE integration that we can't seem to get resolved.  I have a synchronization log on my desk as I type with over 900 error messages to clean up.  I'm still hopeful that we can eventually find solutions (because I refuse to let it get the best of me) but it has been 4 years now . . . so who knows.

For starters, it would be nice if PE could be set up to match the business rules for RE specifically the rule for multiple memberships.  In RE (for us), multiple memberships per constituent is not allowed.  This is not the case for PE, therefore if the cashier mistakenly adds or sells a membership to a current member instead of renewing it, that record does not integrate to RE and the record in RE still shows as lapsed. Duplicate records in the system are a major headache and cannot be merged or deleted. I have found no way to clean up these records despite several requests for assistance from Blackbaud.  

We are also unable to synch dropped memberships since they do not have an expiration date, so those records also appear as an errors on the Synchronization Log.

The number of children or member household totals do not integrate from RE to PE.  Our onsite ticketing staff is unable to verify the number of children without logging in to RE and toggling between the two systems. Very time-consuming when there are long lines.  It would be fantastic if that number could be recorded on the main page of the client record.

Some constituent codes from RE are synched over as client types in PE and some are not (I don't know why).  Also, PE does not display multiple client types (constituent codes).  For example, a VIP visitor with RE constituent codes of major donor, board member, and Charter member . . .these codes are not integrated into PE.

We seem to discover new problems daily.  The time we spend trying to correct problems is wasteful and frustrating. 

Mara-Lynne

We user PE/PEO and integrate with our RE install on the backend.  The Integration Tool works well and can be set to run every 5 mintues.  But, there are some fields that can not come over to RE and some limitations, but for basic PE/RE integration it works well.