Our organization is doing an audit of our Membership levels and it led to a question about if we should consider Gala contributions (tickets, donations, etc) as counting toward Membership levels. I'm hoping to do a little research on how other organizations handle Gala contributions in terms of Memberships and thought I'd start with the Tessitura community! Does your organization count Gala contributions toward Membership? Why or why not?
I appreciate any feedback you can share! Thank you!
I feel as though I've been hearing this question come up frequently recently. However, my answer is typically a big NO! Gala donors are inherently different from annual fund donors/members. My experience is that gala donors often give as a quid pro quo for a friend who invited them/asked them (usually a board member) or in honor of the honoree or they are people who like parties as opposed to those who come to the organization frequently and want to be ongoing supporters. Also, the tax deduction implications can get so messy assuming your memberships have some goods and services portion and the gala has a different goods/services amount associated with the gift. However, that being said, at organizations I've worked for, we try to follow up with gala donors, especially larger ones and keep them in the loop about our season and what's going on. If they are determined to be prospects, we will add them to a portfolio and selectively invite them to events as a cultivation strategy. For recognition purposes, I've often been asked to combine both annual fund/membership gifts and gala gifts as the cumulative amount to determine listing level for playbill, for example. While that can also get tricky, I think it's still cleaner to keep gala gifts out of membership.
Thank you, Gina! This is very helpful.
We also keep this separate. We treat the gala as a separate event/brand from our annual fund. Depending on the donation there could be benefits tied to that gift, but those benefits are specific to their gala donation and do not automatically get them the same benefits as a corporate member or sponsor at a similar level.
We have some levels for our Ball that has annual fund membership as one of the benefits of that giving level for the Ball. I had to do major clean up for our memberships too as they had tied their Ball gifts to their AF membership. Anyways that was a mess, but we finally cleaned it up. I manually add the membership to the patrons account and put in the notes that they have that membership as a result of their Ball gift. This only applies to patrons who do not already have a membership at that level. I note it with my gift officers as well as keep a list in Tess of the patrons who have received an AF membership as a result of their Ball gift. I hope that helps!
Thank your for your thoughts!
Very helpful! Thank you, Shannon.