Good afternoon all,
Curious to hear from other organizations about what is considered to be "best practices" for setting up the Special Event record on constituents for Elevated Events.
We're currently set up so that whoever is paying for a table at our gala has the patron gift put on their record. As a result, the Event record is also generated for them on their History tab. Clicking into the Special Event window, we add guests for anyone who is attending the event only as a result of that gift. Even if the record is an incomplete table, we won't add guests we know will be at the same table because we don't want their attendance to be recognized as a consequence of that gift.
Is anybody setting this up so that the event record is listing all guests at the table (even if they've given their own separate gift to qualify to attend the event)?
This latter methodology (which we're not using) would seem to potentially provide a cleaner set up of tables, but I worry that it might add more confusion at the end of the day because it ends up recognizing attendees for another person/organization's contribution to the event.
Thank you,
Brian
Hi Brian,
I've handled this by creating a "Paid Hosted" event status. So if I am being hosted by a board member, but pay for my seat myself, I get linked as attending via the board member's event, and have my own event with "Paid Hosted" status, with no guests linked.
It has worked well for me.
Megan
Unknown said: I've handled this by creating a "Paid Hosted" event status. So if I am being hosted by a board member, but pay for my seat myself, I get linked as attending via the board member's event, and have my own event with "Paid Hosted" status, with no guests linked. It has worked well for me.
Thank you, Megan!
For a lot of our gala attendees, there aren't individuals paying their own way if they're hosted as a guest of the table purchaser, but that's a good example.
I have an event status that is "Gala Guest" and we use that to put unpaid guests of somebody who has bought a whole table on that main record of the constituent that made the purchase. That puts the event on the guest's constituent record as a "soft credit" deal so that clicking from their record shows the event record for the hosting constituent.
Where it gets tricky for me is, for example, when we have a table of 10 people and we've filled it up with five couples who purchased separate patron sponsorships of two seats each. There's no single "host" of this table because it's five separate couples who have all paid the same amount of money to attend, so I would feel strange ascribing "host" status to a single couple and then have the other eight people appearing--at first blush--to be their guests.
Last year we used the Table and Seat designations on the individual guest line items to help gather together different groups of patrons who would be seated together, and then arranged them that way through the Event Listing report.
Thank you again, glad to hear another perspective on this!
I may have misunderstood your original Q - agree, different paid couples at one table result in separate Attending events on each account, with "table #" being the link. I do wish Tess would give us an easy editing screen so that updating table and seat #s were easier, perhaps like the my portfolio or plans editor screen...
I omitted in my first message that the "Paid Hosted" scenario would be omitted from reservation reports, since the patron(s) are linked via their hosts' event. So event status is the control.
Unknown said: I do wish Tess would give us an easy editing screen so that updating table and seat #s were easier, perhaps like the my portfolio or plans editor screen...
I do wish Tess would give us an easy editing screen so that updating table and seat #s were easier, perhaps like the my portfolio or plans editor screen...
Giant thumbs-up to this; it would be great to have a graphical seating representation where we could put guests together at tables and then have their Elevated Event table and seat information update as directed in the constituent record.