Tracking Bricks and Publishing

Miki Martin

I have found a few helpful posts so far on this question out here but am still curious how others might attack this situation. Years ago our school started offering engraved bricks in our large Marian Circle outside our entrance. Initially our department was using eTap (I wasn't here) so we have an Affiliation of Brick, although we cannot confirm if that is who purchased it or who has one in their name. Upon migrating to RE those Affiliations became Custom Fields.

I would like to have a better way of tracking this information.

• I want to know not only who purchased a brick (which all typically goes through one fund, with exceptions, of course), but also who is being honored/memorialized by said brick.
• We would love to have an interactive way for our alumnae to look up where their brick is in our Marian Circle. Right now we only have a rough Google Sheet listing a very manual numbering system that isn't friendly to searches (i.e. the entire inscription is in one cell verbatim).

I loved the idea I found earlier under Using Event Records to Track Plaques to utilize the Event module seating option for locations of bricks. I can see how I could translate the Google sheet information to this. Even though it is a bit difficult to truly map this large circle (estimated 25 feet in diameter) I can try.

I was considering utilizing the Tribute module to show who had a brick in their name and then we could see who contributed toward that purchase. I found where someone else mentioned doing this under Brick Campaign Tracking. This would all have to be added after the fact, of course, but would then be an easier way to know who already has a brick since we only allow one per alumna.

Looking at all this it appears we would have to track information in a couple of places in RE that cannot link. But, would we be able to take that information tracked in the Event module and translate it into something we could post on our website where alumnae could look up where their brick is? I just learned of something the Cincinnati Reds have that is kind of what we are thinking of wanting to do. We could have an aerial picture of our circle with the quadrants labeled for easier location.

Sorry for the length. I'm just trying to be thorough. I appreciate all your thoughts on this!

Austen Brown

@Miki Martin - I recommend you track this in a central location, rather than repurposing Event or Tribute records to accomplish this. If this were me, I would have a series of custom fields/attributes on the gift record that paid for the brick - quadrant (drop-down for desc, brick # location in comments), brick size (drop-down with choices), Engraved With (text field).

You may be able to utilize a platform like Power Automate to bring this data out of RE as brick purchases are made and store it in a place where a widget on your website could reference the list to aid in look-up for alumnae on the front end of your site. I think this is possible in theory, but you'd have a do a fair amount of research for the second half (getting data to a list the website can reference). It is likely you'll need to get your IT department involved for that piece.

To learn more about what Power Automate can do for you and your organization, check out this blog post -