Sponsors versus Registrants

Matthew Smith 5 · August 2018

I have been perusing the community posts and haven't really seen a consensus on this. I work for a healthcare organization, and we traditionally have not used the events module to its fullest potential. The first thing we need to do though is make a decision on how to enter data in a consistent and intuitive way. If I understand properly, BlackBaud's intent is that a sponsor is an individual/organization that is paying for something more that just the price of a ticker/dinner/golfer. A registrant is an individual/organization that was invited by our organization to the event. A guest is an individual that was invited by a registrant to the event. The non-intuitive part though is that sponsor cannot have guests, so now our definition of a registrant also includes "guests" of sponsors.

So I'm wondering what benefit there is to classifying a participant as a sponsor? If we only ever used registrants and guests, would that break any reports? I could still identify a "sponsor" by looking at the registration field and also the registration fee field. I get the impression a number of community members favor just using registrants, so I'm specifically hoping to hear some sponsor advocates so I can see what I might be missing.

Thanks,

Matt

Patti Posey · August 2018

Hi Matthew:

This may sound a little confusing, but I will try to explain how and why we use this. First we are a healthcare organization and use the events module in both RE and Luminate to the fullest. Every event we do whether ticketed or RSVP will be created in Luminate to feed in to our event set up in RE. Everyone that buys tickets or RSVPs to events automatically get added to the events module marking them as registered. We only enter our sponsors in the RE events module if the purchase a table or tickets to an event. When they do, the sponsor (organization) gets added to the events module but are marked do no register so the don't get added to our totals of attendees. Depending on the number of tickets or table a sponsor purchases, that number will be allocated and entered as their guests and registered. This gives us an accurate number of attendees. We do not track other sponsorship (journal add pages, walk sponsors, etc) in the event module. They either get tracked in AuctionMaestro or TeamRaiser. They are entered in RE through a gift batch and will be coded with an appeal (name of event) and appeal package (sponsorship type) so they can be identified as a sponsor when pulling reports.

Hope this helps a little!

Patti Posey

Stamford Hospital Foundation

Julie Hiland · May 2019

The orgs I've worked for have only ever used Registrants and Guests, not Sponsors. I, too, would love to know the benefit of using Sponsors. Nearly all of our "sponsors" send people to our events, so whichever way is best, we have to be able to link the sponsors to their guests. (I currently work for a large healthcare organization that has 11 hospitals and 1-2 event per hospital each year. We also use LO.)

John Heizer · May 2019

For RE Events the Sponsors seem to be designed for events like a walkathon, where a participant is "sponsored" to walk x number of miles at $y per mile. The Registrant gets linked to their Sponsor's record with information on the amount pledged by the Sponsor.

Matthew Smith 5 · May 2019

That is a very interesting point. I've been thinking of sponsors in regards to a company sponsoring a gala or a donor sponsoring a golf hole. I never thought of it in terms of a walk-a-thon. I'm going to run it by some colleagues, but maybe we'll stop using sponsor for companies and hole sponsors and start treating them as registrants. Thanks Julie for reviving this thread!

Sponsors versus Registrants

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