You can use Donorfy to track invitations, attendance of, and contributions from gala events that your charity may run.

To do this the event will need to be represented in Donorfy by a Campaign. This enables you to track income against a target, costs and various metrics such as ROI and net contributions.

Set up a Campaign

Set up a campaign by clicking on the orange Add button and choose Campaign. For example:

Entering campaign costs

You can track the event's expenses - budgeted or actual - using the Expenses tab of the Campaign page. Just add the costs, and they will be used along with the income to calculate ROI and net donation value.

Invitations

Invitations need to be logged onto the Timeline of the constituents being invited as Activities. To do that, you should first create an Activity Type to use for these registrations. You only need to do this once for this and all future events.

The Activity Type should contain custom fields to represent the information you need, such as dietary requirements, number of tickets, table number, and whether they have confirmed their intention to come, and whether they attended or not. For example:

This activity type can be reused for other events, not just the event you are creating it for, so make the Description generic as opposed to being for a certain event.

Creating the invitations in constituent timelines

This can be done in bulk if you wish, by creating a List of people that you wish to invite and creating Activities on their timelines for each person in the list. Multiple Lists can be created to make sure you invite everyone you want - for example:

• everyone who attended the same event last year - in which case create an Activity List for people who have a Gala Event Invitation activity for the campaign representing last year's dinner
• everyone who is a friend of... (e.g. a trustee) - in which case create a Connections List for those 1st, 2nd and 3rd level connections of the trustee
• everyone who has given £500 or more this year - in which case create a Constituent List for those whose amount given in the last year is greater than or equal to £500

When the List's results are displayed, click on the Download icon top-left, and select the option to add Activities to the Timeline:

Tickets

When someone books a place (or places) you need to update their invitation to indicate that their place is confirmed. That means editing the invitation in their Timeline that was created in the above process, or adding the invitation if they didn't already have one. Typically you would want to:

• change the status of the activity to confirmed
• enter any dietary requirements
• assign them to a table
  
  

Printing a list of tickets

You can create a List of people coming to the event by creating an Activities List, filtering Gala Dinner Invitations (activity type) for the dinner concerned (campaign). From the results you can export or print a to a PDF.

Attendance

If it's important for you to know who attended the event you will need to update each Activity on the Constituent Timeline and change Attended switch to Yes.

Recording contributions from the event

You can enter donations raised from the event (before, during or after) by entering them into Donorfy in the usual ways - either directly on the constituent timeline, in batch or entered online with payment card details using either the Campaign donation page or a widget in your website. You just need to make sure you select the campaign code on entry of the gift (apart from the Campaign donation page, which is already pointing to the right campaign).

If you wish to process Raffle income or similar from the event you need to make sure you have a Product set up for that kind of income, with the Gift Aid eligibility set correctly. This will ensure that (a) you can analyse it, and (b) Gift Aid will not be collected.

Making a donation web page available for the event

You can use Donorfy's Campaign Donation Page feature to offer a ready-made web page to enable people to contribute before, during or after the event. For more information on how to set one up please see this article.

Pledges

If pledges have been made you need to enter them as Opportunities, and contact the donor for the fulfillment of the pledge which you should then enter as a transaction as above.

Reviewing the event's performance

To see how an event has performed, open the Campaign and click on the Analytics page:

To view the invitations, Opportunities and Transactions that came from the event, view the Event's Timeline: