Events Module: Peer to Peer Events and Teams/Supporting Donations

Jaclyn Whitelock

Hi there!

I am trying to determine the best strategy to use for our upcoming walk/run. Individuals register as either an individual or a member of a team. Supporters can either to an individual on a team, or to the team as a whole.

For cases where a company might send a group of runners, I've toyed with entering the company as a participant, and linking their runner's registrant records to it. However, the company does not necessarily pay for each runner's registration fee. In addition, there are many cases where a group of friends/family create a team, so central enduring name/record (they assign themselves a fun name such as “The Panthers”, and that's that). Alternatively, I had thought of recording the team names groups give themselves (e.g. “The Panthers”) in the “more info” section of each registrant- however, this leaves me with no record to link donations that supporters give to the team as a whole.

I would love to hear how others have approached peer to peer fundraising events that involve this kind of a setup!

Austen Brown

Hi @Jaclyn Whitelock - Are you running registration through an OLX or NXT event form, or another product? What platform is hosting the peer-to-peer fundraising, for registrants to gather support from their friends/family?

Jaclyn Whitelock

Excellent questions, @Austen Brown. All registrations and donations are via a third party platform (RaceRoster). We will be using a mass import software (TBD) to import it from a CSV into RE. Essentially I need to be able to have all these things available in RE for longer term reporting- I was recently asked how much a particular donor had raised through his participation in this event over the years, and had no way to answer using RE as it simply had not been linked in any way in the past.

Austen Brown

It's good to hear you have a platform you'll be using to manage the front end. The tracking within RE will be tricky, as I'm sure you have already encountered, hence your original question.

In the past, I have tracked this with every registrant getting their own participant record, and on the participant record denoting if they were apart of the team, or simply an individual + who was captain of said team + goal information - I did this through participant attributes. For donations received directly to the fundraiser's page, I linked the gifts as 'other donations' to the that registrant's participant record. If the donation was given directly to the team page rather than an individual's then I noted that within the gift reference field and linked it with the team captain's participant record as an ‘other donation’.

This method is by no means the best, but worked for me in the moment when I was trying to at least get something in the system related to the original gift and where it originated (fundraiser or team page). I should note, that at the time we were utilizing TeamRaiser (TR) and viewed that platform as our primary location to look up past event support; the information in RE was a back-up should we ever drop TR.

I have also heard of tracking this directly on the gift record rather than linking gifts to a participant record, by utilizing the solicitor/fundraiser gift credit. This has implications with ‘muddying’ your solicitor/fundraiser pool if the fundraiser marked as a solicitor within the system and is added to the donor's record as an assigned solicitor, but it would lend itself better to the native reporting available through RE.

Rachel Cavalier

Austen Brown:

I have also heard of tracking this directly on the gift record rather than linking gifts to a participant record, by utilizing the solicitor/fundraiser gift credit. This has implications with ‘muddying’ your solicitor/fundraiser pool if the fundraiser marked as a solicitor within the system and is added to the donor's record as an assigned solicitor, but it would lend itself better to the native reporting available through RE.

I wonder if it's possible to utilise the “Recognition Credit” field that arrived when the JustGiving Integration was introduced and if so, how. ?

Austen Brown

@Rachel Cavalier - That's great idea! You would definitely have to test it out though and see how the connection translates to Database View reporting.

Jaclyn Whitelock

In the past, I have tracked this with every registrant getting their own participant record, and on the participant record denoting if they were apart of the team, or simply an individual + who was captain of said team + goal information - I did this through participant attributes. For donations received directly to the fundraiser's page, I linked the gifts as 'other donations' to the that registrant's participant record. If the donation was given directly to the team page rather than an individual's then I noted that within the gift reference field and linked it with the team captain's participant record as an ‘other donation’.

Thank you for your detailed breakdown! This is the part I was struggling with the most- I had planned to link donations in support of individual fundraisers in that way, but the team part was presenting a struggle- the captain, with a clear reference would allow for that discernment at least.

It is definitely a bit of a struggle trying to manipulate event information to “fit” into RE correctly- Race Roster seems to do a decent job of capturing information and reports, and we do have the ability to go back, however I do want to move to a system where all information regardless of event or platform gets in RE so that it is all in a central location for future reporting/comparisons/etc.

Jaclyn Whitelock

Rachel- that's an interesting thought. We do not use JustGiving- is this recognition credit is specific to it, or is it within RE NXT?

Rachel Cavalier

It's within RE NXT you don't have to activate JustGiving integration for it to show up, I think that it just has to have been rolled out in your area. In webview it shows up on gifts as a link to the constituent that owns the JustGiving page and last time I investigated, it showed up in DB view as just an attribute (not ideal but maybe that has changed now?).