How to track products sold

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Cheri Crist
Cheri Crist
Fifth Anniversary Photogenic First Comment Activity: First Reply
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
We're relatively new to RE. We sell a few items on our website--books, art prints, DVDs, and in our old CRM, we would track purchases with a little checkbox marked "Retail" and a description of the product in the Notes field. What method would you use in RE to be able to filter for items purchased on our website? Gift attributes? Appeal? Something else altogether? (For context, we treat these as gifts even though they're obviously not.) TYIA!
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  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
    Ancient Membership 2,500 Likes 2500 Comments Photogenic
    What kind of / how detailed a filtering are you needing? Fund would be specific to purchases vs. donations. I would use a gift attribute. If you need specifics perhaps a category of 'Merchandise Sales' and then a table of items for the description field.


    When you say "(For context, we treat these as gifts even though they're obviously not.)" do you mean just because you record in RE? You're receipt document is different, I hope.
  • Brian Davies
    Brian Davies
    Tenth Anniversary 25 Likes 10 Comments Photogenic
    We track transactional purchases with a specific fund (silent auction item, tickets, etc) We typically put the item purchased in the reference field. If you are doing a ton of sales you can setup a campaign for your retail sales then a fund of each item you are selling. This way you could easily pull campaign reports for total sales or fund reports for granular sales like how much did we sell in DVDs. Appeals are great for figuring out how the purchaser got to the sale. For example, Campaign: FY21 Retail Sales, Fund: DVD Sales, Appeal: Fall Membership Drive Postcard.
  • Lynnette Fisher
    Lynnette Fisher
    Seventh Anniversary 10 Comments 25 Likes Photogenic
    We have a huge dinner / auction gala every year (550+ people or we did before Covid, had to do it virtually this year, but the tracking concept remained the same) and track all Live & Silent auction purchase, sponsorships and donations separately. We also track In-kind donations to the event. This event is tracked 3 ways. We have a Campaign specifically for this event. BTBJ 20/21. We have Appeals for each section: 2020 BTBJ Sponsorship, 2020 Live Auction purchase, 2020 Silent Auction purchase, 2020 Scholarship Challenge donation, etc. We also have separate Funds for each: i.e., BTBJ Scholarship fund, BTBJ Auction purchase, etc. This way we can track comparisons year to year in an overarching fashion by Campaigns BTBJ 19/20 vs BTBJ 20/21 or granularly by Appeals. 2019 Live Auction vs 2020 Live Auction, etc.


    With the live and silent auctions we also track the deductible/non-deductible portions by utilizing the benefits button. The Purchased items are also logged on the Benefits tab in the comment section. Example: L3 "Dinner on the Town" Value $500.


    The In-kind silent and live auction items which are donated are tracked as an in-kind gift and the description of the donated item is captured in the reference field because I found pulling the reference field into reports was easier than a gift attribute.


    Lots of information, maybe more than you were looking for - sorry - got going and couldn't stop... :)


    Hope this helps.

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