Managing Events in The Raiser’s Edge®
The Events add-on module (RE: Events) for Blackbaud’s The Raiser’s Edge 7 is a wonderful tool for keeping track of all the data you’ll need to make your event a success. Colleagues will be able to view monetary and registration totals, even if you’re out of the office.
Organizing People
With the Events module, you can see the big picture when it comes to your event. It is easy to keep track of people as they move from invitees to registrants. After sending invitations, people can be added to the event and marked as invited. As they start to respond, you can mark them as registered.
Often times people will bring guests to an event. These participants can be recorded in the event and linked with the one who invited them.
Sponsors can also be recorded in the event, along with anyone they may be sponsoring or inviting.
Organizing Money
You’re able to see how many people are coming, as well as how much you are bringing in.
During the planning phase of the event, you can enter the budgeted amount for various expenses including printing, postage, venue rental, catering and the other various costs for the event. Then after the invitations have been sent and the caterer booked you can enter the actual costs.
You can also keep track of the money that comes in for the event.
Registration and sponsorship fees can be recorded on the prices tab. Benefits received can be recorded as well so that you know the receipt amount to provide. For example, if the registration fee is $20 and they receive a $10 t-shirt, the tax receipt will be $10.
If participants can register for the event before paying, you can add the registration fee to their participant record now and link the gift when they pay later. If there is an unpaid fee on a constituent’s record, when you enter a gift Raiser’s Edge will ask if you would like to apply the gift to an unpaid registration fee.
Any additional donations given to or by participants can be recorded in The Raiser’s Edge and linked to the event.
After factoring in the expenses, you can easily determine how much you’ve brought in with your event.
Reports
There are a number of reports within The Raiser’s Edge to help with analysis. These reports can help with organizing before and analyzing the outcome of the event.
A report I like is the Event List. This report gives you a basic overview of the participation, fee information (though not the actual gift data), sponsor, registration and attended status. This can be helpful in organizing the guest list and seeing who is registered and their participation.
Another report that is helpful is the Registration Fees Due Report. This gives you a list of participants that have a registration fee on the participant record, but no gift linked.
A simple report to run that gives a lot of information post-event, is the Financial Summary. This can be found in the tool bar for the event, in the Summary icon. There are a number of parameters to select, if desired. Once you run the report, there are different views and breakdowns which will help with analyzing the financial outcome.
How to See This Information in One Place
An easy way to organize participant records and analyze response is with Omatic Software’s event management software, EventOmatic. EventOmatic gives a one-screen view of the participant tab for the event.
With EventOmatic, you can filter or sort your list based on columns for participation, registration, status and many more. You can customize your view by deciding which columns are important for each event.
The entire view can be exported into a flat file providing information such as response, registration fees, pledge balance, attributes and much more. You can create a customized spreadsheet based on your customized column selections.
EventOmatic also provides the ability to email participants. With built in mail merge fields, these emails can be personalized for each event and participant.
