Managing Third Party Fundraising using Event Records - cannot have the same participant multiple times on the same even record.

Mark Palfrey

Hello Community!

We utilise the Events module for management of Challenge Events in the recommended way by having 1 event record for each event. However when it comes to fundraisers doing their own event/fundraising (e.g. someone doing a coffee morning or someone shaving their hair) we do not wish to setup a whole event records for each specific activity otherwise we would have hundreds of event records a year. An approach which we have had good success with until recently has been creating an Event record per FY called "Third Party Fundraising FY24/25" and adding each third party fundraising activity as a participation record. . On each of those participation records we capture participation attributes and donations against it so it's all contained nicely in that participation record. However, we have found that some of our wonderful fundraisers are starting to do more than 1 third party fundraising in a FY and we hit an problem! RENXT by design won't allow us to add another participation from the same individual to the event record (understandably you cannot participate twice in a single event as per design of the events module).

So we are a bit stuck when this situation plays out and although it doesn't happen very often I would like to get an idea of how others record this type of fundraising. Any ideas of a way around our conundrum or alternative solutions without reinventing the whole process? The way we have gone about it currently is creating a 2nd Third Party Fundraising Event record for the FY and adding the second participation to that one. However that means potentially having 2 event records for this type of activity per FY which seems a little messy also. What if someone does 3 or more in a year its starts to get a little silly.

Any thoughts and ideas are welcome! Thank you!

Rachel Cavalier

@Mark Palfrey
For challenge events, we have a package for each participant for every event that they do, that we record the donations with.

For the various annual organised events like the London Marathon, we have a specific appeal for that these packages will sit under but we also have a “Supporter Led Fundraising” appeal where all of these one off events can go. This way if someone cuts their hair off but later in the year they do a skydive, we can have two different packages for each of these.

Alex Wong

@Mark Palfrey
if you don't want to “revamp” the process, the easiest thing to do is to create the particpant record in dbview, which allows the same constituent record to have mulitple participant record.

However, I'm not too understanding of your situation. Data recording is only useful for when the data needs to come out and “how” it comes out. So from that perspective what are you trying to report? maybe use opportunity?

Rachel Cavalier

@Mark Palfrey
Coming back to this - I've also seen tributes used to record this kind of thing rather than events, though we don't do this ourselves.