Event Items (Dinners, Auctions, etc.)

Here's another of my epic posts, with all the details. 

At my former job, we had a giant gala every year that consumed all our time and energy for months, and after some tweaking, we got the RE side of it down pretty well. And we didn't have the Events module, so if you're inthe same boat, this might be helpful.The event had about 460 attendees each year and 125-130 auction items plus a paddle call, so we didn't bother with packages at all - though we could have in the Sponsorships (see below). Each appeal had a different acknowledgement letter in the "Master Ack" Mail file. 


Fund ID= ####/YY (our funds were all numbers and we used the same number every year, then /YY changed to represent the curent year)

Appeal - this is where all the action took place:

   Gifts-in-Kind (auction items) entered gift type= Gift in Kind. Gift amount was as stated by donor (we mostly auctioned art): the purchaser only got a "donation" credit if the price paid was more than the stated amount. That we did by hand - with only about 125 items in the whole auction it wasn't that hard to do and we didn't do it on the spot - we did it in the week after the gala back at the ofice. The Gift-in-Kind also had several attributes: Item # (Category, date of event, and item #); "GinK Sold"set to $0 until after the event, where we would fill in the amount and the name of the purchaser (or "Not Sold"); and "Gala Guest" to enter the name of the person using the free artist seat or the at-cost artist guest seat. We also added the Benefit of "Gala Ticket" but set the value at $0 for the artist. There were also Gift Attributes to indicate if the donor was affiliated with the college (alumni, faculty, board,etc), and, if the donor was not the artist, then the tribal and college affiliation of the artist. We used this information (including the Reference for a description) to produce the labels for the bid sheets.

   Sponsorships - (tables)  The Gift Amount would tell us which level of table they were taking. The Benefit would be entered as however many seats they were using at the set cost we determined per person, and that would alter the Receipt amount, which was then listed as the "Donation portion" of the total on their acknowledgment letter. The "Gala Guest" attribute was added to the gift for each attendee (Last, First in description, Table Name in Comments), and we used that on spreadsheets to see who was sitting where. I messed around trying to use Relationships for Table hosts and guests, but it didn't work well becasue we did households instead of separate records for spouses. 

   Tickets - handled like Sponsorships, but with fewer counts of the Benefit, and the same number of "Gala Guest" attributes with the names of the attendees. Comped and staff tickets were listed as a $0 donation under tickets for the Foundation (as host) and the names added in the same way.

   Donations - for the "can't attend but here's a donation" folks. Obviously this was a straight donation. In the case of both Donations and Tickets, there was also an attribute of "List as Sponsor" so that if we had some special reason to list them ($ amount, expected donation by the venue of costs, ergo "sponsorsed by Hotel X") we could query on that and add all the "sponsorships" to make one list for the printed materials.

   Art Sales - (live or silent auction) the purchasers were all entered in batches after the event and the receipt amount automatically set to $0. This is where we would change the receipt amount to the excess of the declared value if the item sold for more. In the reference field, we would always start with the item number so that we could sort to compare with the GinKs list. If they bought more than one item (not uncommon), we would list each in Reference with the price paid for each. That way we could add the sale price back to the GinK attribute, but we'd enter the whole gift once. 

   Paddle Call - a regular donation or pledge, nothing fancy. 


In this way, we could roll up all cash to the fund level. I still had to do some fancy dancing because of a restriction on the Trustees' giving - they wanted all their gifts (or revenues generated by their auction donations) to go towards their named scholarship. Everything else went to the general scholarship fund. But that all happened well after the event when all the bills had been paid and we could see what had to be deducted from the gross revenue to get the net, then transfer the funds from the Foundation to the college. I could also run all kinds of queries on these various attributes and benefits. I even tried adding a Gift Attribute of "Photographed?" to keep track of the GinKs that still need to be recorded for the website and promotional materials, but that got to be more trouble than it was worth. And the appeal reports were the quickest way to see how we had done in every category. It took some time to prepare, but it worked really well.


In the last two years I was there, we tried two different third-party check in/check out systems, feeding our RE guest and GinK information into them semi-manually, so that we could speed up the process. They were only partially successful, mainly because we had two years in a row of setting up a new system. If we had stuck with either of them, it would have been easier after that, I imagine. They each had their own challenges, but one of the biggest was the bad internet connections at the venue! We also never had time to do really thorough training for the volunteers working the check-in and registers. I won't pretend I miss the gala now that I'm an independant contractor. I'm getting too old for a month of 60 hour weeks!


Gracie Schild

Bluebird Business Services

Santa Fe, NM