Our Organization is having a series of Special Events to familiarize the community with us and our Capital Campaign. Attendees are not necessarily potential donors. However, eventually we will not only be interested in tracking donors, but potential patrons and students. Presently all our invitation lists are on Excel Spreadsheets and are not entered into the RE database. We are not sure how to handle who should be entered into the database and how to code them. Would enter everyone invited? Would you only enter everyone who shows up at the event? Would you enter only those who are prospects? Would you create new constituent codes for those who will never be donors? We do not have the Events module, so those who I do enter will have an attribute of the Event. I don’t want to hose-up the database with a lot of useless constituent records, but I also don’t want to lose valuable information. If anyone has some experience or advice, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Dana Wynkoop Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts [Email Removed]

The first question is how many people are on these lists? Is it 100 or 10,0000? This determins how much work it will be to enter into RE. The next question for you is do you want to track how many people you invited? How many showed up? How many actually gave you a donation? If the answer is yes to all 3 questions, then enter everyone into RE. If the event is on 10/10/06 then import everyone from your Excel file into RE and give them the attribute of Event Invited and the date of 10/10/06. If they gave you a gift on that date then you record that data. If they showed up and did not give a gift then you can give them another attribute of Event Attended 10/10/06. Remember that just because someone does not donate at this time, they may donate at a later date. If you send out invitation letters to these people then you can set up an Appeal and when the money comes in you can add this appeal to their gift. I would stay away from adding constituent codes because they just clutter up your database. We used to have donor and prospect constituent codes, but I deleted them because no one changed the constituent code when the prospect gave a gift. If they gave a gift then they are a donor and they are a prospect until they give a gift. Hopefully this helps. Don Sabo Forum Health Youngstown, Ohio 330-884-4814 [Email Removed]

You may want to enter your event as an action rather than an attribute. This is what we use when we hold events. We globally add the date of the event and all other pertinent information, with status of "invited", using the same query as the mailing list for the global add. You could put in the action information when you import the constituents.

As people respond, their status gets changed to "Responded" (with regrets) or "Will Attend". Tracking those that respond shows more inclination to be active with your organization than those who can't come and don't bother to respond. After the event, those people's status gets changed to "Attended". After the event, everyone will have one of 4 statuses. Those that still say "Will Attend" were no-shows, those that still say invoted didn't repond at all, etc.

Johanna

Johanna M. Shaw
Development and Alumni Relations Associate
School Year Abroad
[Email Removed]