Hi Everyone,

 I was wondering if someone could let me know how his/her company tracks and names events. Currently, we are using an attribute to track events. For example, we have a walk coming up in September, and we're going to call it 2009 NJ Run/Walk. Some in our office, though, feel that it is a mistake to designate events by year...I think this is mainly because if they  want to do a query to find out the total amount of money a particular event has raised over the years, you have to pull over 2007, 2008, 2009, etc.  They're worried that this will be too much say 20 years from now.  They are thinking it would be better to call an event "NJ Run/Walk," year after year, and we'll know what year the individual donations are from by the gift date.  I don't really agree with this, especially because some people donate gifts months after a given event.  I'm thinking instead, we could maybe designate an appeal as NJ Run/Walk and call it 2009 NJ Run/Walk either using the attributes we currently have, or in the events module.

 What do you all think?  I hope this isn't too confusing! Thanks!

We Name our events by year and tie the gifts to each event that pertain to that event. I would think your accounting department would have issues with you not keeping them separated - especially if the events don't always raise funds for the same project (unrestricted versus restricted). I would think your issue could easily be solved by using the Event Type or Event Group fields so there is only one field to query on instead of using event ID as your criteria.

a couple of other thoughts. 

We budget per year and the event monies would need to be budgeted and the results tabulated per event - especially because we use accrual accounting (pledges) and pledge payments may not be received in the same year that the event occured. Finances on events would truly be a mess if every year was combined into one event. Tying pledge payments to which year of the event they were paying for would be horrific if there weren't actual events and registration fees to tie them back to. We take 5 year pledges for events and being able to tell the events planner who has paid prior to the event would be a nightmare for me without making the events singular.

Appeal is also a good field to utilize unless you have multiple mailings/reply devices/sources that you need to track for your gifts.

Thanks so much, Laurel!  You've really validated my concerns of not separating events by year.  We've only started using Raiser's Edge in January, so when they did the import, all the events came under as attributes, which is why we're not totally using the Events Module yet.  And since you mentioned using Appeals, do you think that we could name an appeal after an event that takes place annually, and then use the attribute function to designate the event for a particualr year?

 Thanks again!

I would use the appeal as an all encompassing like Golf Sponsor

I would then link the actual gifts to the annual event like 09Golf, 10Golf, etc. as registration fees or other donations as appropriate.  I wouldn't use attributes at all if I had the event module. Attributes CAN be used in the Gift Detail and Summary report but I would worry that attributes would be accidentally left off of some records because they are not required.

 There is an issue with using just appeal to track events for us that may persuade you to use the event module and run your reporting from the event module.  We have corporations and donors that may make a Multi-year pledge in response to a Campaign, but decide on an annual basis that they want to use thier pledge payment that year as a sponsorship to one of our many events- usually not the same one every year. The appeal on the pledge payment will be the appeal from the original pledge, however the gift will be linked to a registration fee on the event module.

Hi Jackie - I use a seperate appeal every year for each of our events (golf2009, golf2010, etc.) and I use packages to seperate out sponsorships, registration fees, donations, etc. Every gift is then linked to the registration fee of an event participation - even for our pledged events we link gifts to registration fees.  This is because registration fees are the only thing that will show up on an individual constituents event tab.  This way people can quickly click on the event tab for an individual and see how much they raised in total pledges for each event they were a part of.  I've never used gift attributes for anything.