Using TeamRaiser for P2P fundraising?

Brian Mucha:

We do have a Do It Yourself teamraiser, which is structured just like that. (http://luriechildrens.org/cofonline)


The problem with joining more than once is duplicate email addresses which are generally not allowed.


Usually they aren't actually doing two fundraisers at once, so we just disable the old one so they can register again.


If they are concurrent, then it's a little harder. Some email services like gmail allow you to easily make an alias for your address. MyName@gmail.com is the same as MyName+Anything@gmail.com. Otherwise they usually just use different email accounts.


The key for us seems to be having an event cordinator that stays in touch with everyone and helps them navigate problems like that.


It's a bit clunky, for sure. If it's really a problem, I think you can have Luminate set to allow duplicate email use in Teamraiser. You can definitely have it allow duplicates during registration, so parents can register their minor kids with the same address.

Brian Mucha:

Our DIY is a completely separate Teamraiser from our normal annual events. These DIYs are generally honor/memorials, in lue of gifts for some life event like a birthday or wedding, or participation in some other marathon/event that we don't directly support with a Teamraiser. So we don't move any of that fundraising to personal pages in other events. I can't think of any way to do that, aside from periodic offline gift imports.


I wonder if you could use a team and secondary registrations with a special participant type for these mini-fundraisers within your main event fundraiser. You can set up TR to allow duplicate email addresses with main and secondary registrations. And both would contribute to the team total. Not sure if you could design that to not be confusing though. So you'd have Team Brian, with my regular registration and a secondary registration for a spagetti dinner fundraiser mini-event. Both would contribute to Team Brian and both are run by me. Edit: They would have to know they are doing a mini-event at time of registration tho. Not ideal.


Using teamraiser for this rather than the LO Personal Fundraising module is pretty common, since Personal Fundraising is so ancient and clunky. BBCon usually has sessions about doing this.


Using TR for DIY does come with it's own problems. The already-in-use email address problem in this thread is a biggie. You could add a registration question asking for a close date, so you can plan on when to manually deactivate the fundraiser's registration - which would allow that person to reregister at a later date.


Another problem we ran into relates to Fair Market Value when the fundraisers are offering tickets or items in exchange for donations. That's a problem, since you can't change the FMV for individual fundraisers. We generally just keep an eye on the fundraisers and caution them to not use that arrangement. We also require approvals for the DIY before fundraiser pages go live, which we don't use elsewhere.


Otherwise it's not really much different from any other Teamraiser, Feel free to register for Circle of Friends (http://luriechildrens.org/cofonline) to see how we built ours, there shouldn't be a registration fee. Shoot me a PM if you want me to remove you afterwards so you don't get all the coaching email.


- BPM

Brian Mucha:

Jason Thomas:

In teamraiser, it would be helpful if we when participants to these DIY event sign up, they have to specify the duration of the event. When the event expires, their page is automatically taken down, and their LO record is no longer an active participant. Free to sign back up to the same DIY event at a later time. I wonder if there's custom programming around this area. 

I can't think of a way to code this to happen automatically on our own. I suppose anything can be done if you contract BB for custom changes, though.


I would probably just make it a standard practice to stick an appointment in the event manager's Outlook calendar (or maybe a shared calendar) for that expiration date whenever a participant registers. Then it would be a simple routine to manually inactivate fundraisers each morning. Pasting the url to the fundraisers profile in that appointment would make it even easier. We have to approve new registrant's personal pages before they go live, so we're right there anyhow.


This might be a good one for the IDEAS board.

 

J.D. Piland:

Hello there,


For quite some time now, we have been building out P2P fundraising into TeamRaiser. I have found some community posts about people other orgs doing the same. They just happen to be several years old.


So, I'm wondering if there is still anyone doing this? And, perhaps more importantly, how do you handle registrants who want to do multiple fundraisers? We currently have our program built out in one TeamRaiser, with the event types (birthday, wedding, etc.) represented by Participation Types. Our concern now is for those who want to do a birthday and then a wedding later in the year, for example -- after all, the user can only register once per TR. Anyone run into the same conern, and how do you address it?


Thanks in advance!

Brian Mucha:

Jason Thomas:

Hi Brian, when you say "Usually they aren't actually doing two fundraisers at once, so we just disable the old one so they can register again." Can you please describe your workflow?

So it's just a matter of opening the participant record, clicking 'Make Inactive' and then 'Remove Participant'. This leaves the constituent record alone, but it converts all their gifts to event gifts and removes the participant record. It would be awesome if Make Inactive did the job, but no soap - so I guess a better term would have been 'delete'. But everything has presumably already synced to RE or whatever your CRM is if you need to do historical reporting.

 

J.D. Piland:

Not to mention refreshing the TR events each year.

We don't refresh every year, but we did recently replace our old Circle of Friends and a separate old Tribute DIY with this single new design. Rather than registering for the new teamraiser, lots of fundraisers wanted to 'move' their old page to the new TR, along with all of their dozens and sometimes hundreds of gifts. That is a LOT of soft credits to deal with. Many of them had been using their page continually for a few years. My original choice to not refresh every year was for this exact reason. Either you are going to have both years running simultaniously until every fundraiser in the old one finishes, or you will be moving lots of fundraisers. Neither is ideal. I initially resisted moving all of those old gifts but people went crazy.

 

J.D. Piland:

Hey everyone,


Thanks for the great feedback so far! I'm liking the idea of adding a question to the registration process asking for end date. That would be the easiest way for us in our current setup.


That said, I also like the idea of separate TR events, but I wonder how that would work with the sync (we're in LO and Luminate CRM) -- do you have to do a configuration for each events? Not to mention refreshing the TR events each year. @Kerrie -- Do you find this to be a big project, or are you just clicking copy and moving on? What all goes into it on your end?


Thanks again, everyone! Keep the ideas coming!

J.D.