My organization regularly attends Trade Shows. We would like to be able to track our trade show information in Raiser's Edge 7 according to this criteria.... Show Name Show Date Expected Show Turnout (Attendees and Exhibitors) Whether the booth space was comped & that value Price of the booth space if payed for Travel, Meals & Lodging Additional Cost to Exhibit New Contacts made through trade show Revenue generated Exhisting relationship cultivated Any suggestions? Thanks for your help!

Hi Lindsey,

There can be two ways to go about it.

One is through Raiser's Edge Events module (Do you have the events module?).
This will not entirely satisfy your needs as it is meant more for "organizing an event" rather than storing information for "attending an event". But used intelligently you can put some of the fields you mentioned in the events module and make it work for you with some assumptions.

For example, you assume that all the events are the ones you have been attending and then you can store the events name, date, number of participants expected, price of booth etc in prices, expenses in expense tab, in participant tab you can assume that you will be putting the persons you have met in the exhibition!

The second way would be through designing a small utility as Plug-in (let's call it Trade Show module :-) in lack of a better name). It should not be too difficult to make and the cost would be not be too high for a good programmer. The module will contain the following information for you:

1) Show name, details, dates, number of expected participants etc

2) Second tab would be about the expenses/booth price etc which you may require to store

3) A tab which will be linked with raiser's Edge constituent records which will show which new contacts you made in the trade show.

4) A tab for those constituents whom you have met earlier but have again interacted in this particular trade event.

5) Revenue generated: Not sure how you will handle this...A way could be that you can make a particular appeal in Raiser's edge and any gift linked to this appeal will mean that this was due to the trade show which we will display in this tab. How do you handle it manually at present and it will give the best clue to the solution?

6) Some reports which will give you meaningful data...like when did you meet a constituent and in which show, how many times have you met a particular guy, total expenses in the year for various trade shows ... and this you can go on adding later.


I hope I made some sense...<grin>.

If you would like to discuss further on this topic, you are most welcome to contact me off loop at [Email Removed].

Have a nice day!

Sincerely,

Dinesh ---------------------------------------
Greytrix
Blackbaud Development Partner
[Email Removed]
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