Tech Tip: Event Management in FundRaiser

by Larry Weaver

Event Management means keeping track of special events in several different ways:

• How much money has come in through the event?
• How many donors are involved?
• Were invitations sent and to whom?
• Were In-Kind donations involved, such as items for the annual auction, or food/clothing items for redistribution to the less fortunate?
• Do we want to send special thank-you letters specifically for this event?
• Should we have one letter for cash donations and another for In-Kind?

And the list can go on, as many of you know.

For Basic and Select, here are some of the things you’ll want to consider:
(We'll cover Pro next month).

In FundRaiser Basic, you can assign a single Gift Source code on each gift. In this way, you will be able to create a Query of everyone who gave a gift with that Gift Source code during the special event’s time period. That Source code indicates that the gift was motivated by the event publicity or attendance. You can then use that list of people in reports and/or mailings related to the event.

If you receive In-Kind donations, these can be a bit more tricky in FundRaiser Basic, as there is no way to indicate "In-Kind" on the gift. FundRaiser Basic is primarily designed with monetary gifts in mind. That said, you can always enter an In-Kind donation with a "zero" amount, and then put the fair market value amount, and/or a description of the goods donated, in the gifts Notes section. These notes can be printed in letters and in some reports, but the amounts recorded in notes this way cannot be totaled by FundRaiser Basic (upgrade to FundRaiser Select to properly handle In-Kind gifts).

Another way to separate monetary donations from In-Kind donations is to have two separate Gift Source codes for an event, one for monetary and one for In-Kind gifts. In that way, you can query them separately and report on them separately. In this case, you will be able to have FundRaiser Basic total amounts for both types of gifts.

With FundRaiser Select, you have unlimited Category codes available per name record, as well as gift codes that include "Motivation", and "Purpose". In addition, each gift can be designated as either Monetary or In-Kind, using the Mode code.

• The Motivation code can be used to indicate why a person gave (or what event prompted the gift) (equal to the Gift Source code in Basic). You may later want to Group people together who gave for a particular event, and the Motivation code allows you to do this quite easily.
• The Purpose code is generally reserved for "ear-marking" funds for a specific use. It, too, can be used to Group people together.

The Donation/Summary report is a very easy way to see what gifts have come in during a specific time period. It also breaks those gifts down into the various codes that are assigned to gifts, as well as codes assigned to donors. For example, it displays the total given for all Motivation entries and all Purpose entries for that time period. It can tell you the total amount contributed (for monetary, In-Kind, or both), as well as how many donors and how many gifts were involved. It’s a great event analysis report.

Normally, you will be creating a Grouping of people to whom you want to send an invitation to an upcoming event. To keep track of who received what letters in FundRaiser Select, Category codes can be mass assigned to everyone in a Grouping. Do this by first opening the Grouping (Groupings > Open), and then choosing Groupings > Assign Category Code. This allows you to keep track of all those who were invited to an event by mail simply by giving them all a Category code (like "Auction Invite 2006"). This will also give you the ability to later find all those who got an invitation who actually gave for that event.

With FundRaiser Select, you can assign the gift thank-you letter when you enter the gift. This allows you to have one letter for In-Kind donations, for instance, and another for monetary gifts. This is especially useful for an event like an auction, where you need to thank some folks for donating items, and thank others for purchasing those items. You will always be able to group people together based on the letter they received for gifts given during a particular time period, as well.

As you can see, even with FundRaiser Basic, there are some things you can do to help keep track of Events and even more that you can do with FundRaiser Select. FundRaiser Professional has new Campaign Management features which allow for even more sophistication. We will cover these next month.

As always, if you have questions, or would like to discuss the possibilities, give us a call in tech support.

Larry Weaver heads our technical support team and leads online training for FundRaiser Select and Pro. In his free time Larry enjoys music, motorcycles and being a grandfather.