Ever Get Frustrated When Managing Your Friends Asking Friends Event’s Company Pyramid?

Company pyramids can feel a little overwhelming or frustrating to resolve when something has gone awry.  For example, if records are merged or deleted, it can cause the whole company or team structure to seem incomplete and inaccurate.  These instances can be confusing to your site visitors and your staff and therefore feel like critical issues to resolve.

In order to save yourself a call to Support (and the billable work to fix company pyramid snafus), keep the following tips in mind before managing in the Event Admin’s Company Pyramid:

• If you want a company pyramid for your event, you must create an event group first and then affiliate the event group to the FAF upon creation.  If the thon does not have an event group and you duplicate it, you still cannot add one.  Instead, you would have to create the event group and recreate the thon from scratch.  How to set up an event group and pyramid structure provides steps to do so.
• This is the overall workflow for maximizing the company pyramid:

• A company leader or co-leader will need a different Supporter ID than their team leader registration.

• A company leader or co-leader will need a different Supporter ID than their team leader registration, unless the leader is selected at the same time as the company creation by marking “Would you like to set up a team for this leader?” and entering the team information.
• In a multi-tier Sphere account, Event Groups can only be created in the parent account. The functionality does not appear in the child accounts. A child account that wants its own FAF template would have to have it created in the parent account. If a child account makes a copy of a pyramid thon, it creates a standard thon.

• Real Time Dedupe or manual data management to merge duplicate records can cause the team captain and company leader record to be merged, which means you will need to create a non-matching supporter record to resolve the problem.
• Deleting a team leader will dissolve the team, but this can be fixed through the event!  If the captain is deleted, all of the team members will become independent participants.  You will have to promote them back to the company once the leader is set up again.  To prevent this from happening, promote an existing registrant as the captain before deleting the current captain.  Check out How to replace a company/team leader in the Company Pyramid system for a FAF to save yourself some headache!

Remember, you are not alone when navigating the pyramid structure!  Have a great idea to make the process better?  Enter your suggestion at our Idea Bank or vote on existing ones like Do not let admins delete team leaders or company leaders.

You can keep up with us on Twitter by following @bbsupport; we use the hashtag #bbsphere when we discuss Blackbaud Sphere. Take a look at our Twitter Guide for more information.