What advice do you have for how to set up ticket sales for a fundraising event where the ticket price should be recorded as a gift in RE? We have done this as regular ticket sales in PE and PEO, and are also experimenting with selling the tickets as donations in PE so that they synch easily with the gift records in RE. What are the advantages and pitfalls for either approach? Is there a better compromise so that you can sell flexibly through PE (online and over the phone) and get a clean list of event attendees whose RE constituent records all show their ticket purchases as gifts?

There are quite a few posts on how to handle this in RE.  The important thing to remember on either approach is that if you are doing this in RE and the ticket is considered goods and services (or a portion of the ticket). There are very strict IRS guidelines for goods and services and if you plan to utilize RE to sell tickets or items that have goods and services attached you must follow them and handle the receipting acknowledging properly.

Cons to doing ticketing in RE as opposed to RE - the tickets cannot be 'attached' to an actual event seat the way normal ticketing software manages the transaction. You can 'seat' someone if you have the event module for RE but you cannot 'build' a facility or manage the transaction from a seat-centric point of view. Seating is not required and capacity is not controlled the way true ticketing software works. I would only utilize RE for tickt purchases if there were actual donations involved; it's not really meant to be a retail environment and the headache to manage receipting and reporting with finance in this scenarion could be cumbersome depending on how your ledgers are set up, etc.