How do you enter event donors and how do you count their giving?

Tracy Wittkopp

How does your org process "event" gifts? We enter them as gift type of "Other" if there is some quid pro quo (for tickets, auction purchases, etc), and we use the Receipt Amount to show the donative value. We have never traditionally counted them as donors in our totals (total number of donors or total amount raised), and we have never added them to our donor walls for donor's cumulative giving. We are considering adding event donors into our totals and adding these to their cumulative giving totals, and I wonder how other orgs handle this? Any insight or examples you can share are helpful! Thanks!

Miki Martin

Good morning, Tracy. I am going to follow this for others' responses. We, too, have not been tracking goods donated for events but I feel we should. Having the additional gifts in their donations would certainly impact their giving history. Thanks for the question!

Linda Burns

We enter value of donated items for auction as a gift in kind and include them in cumulative giving for donor wall purposes.

Tracy Wittkopp

I should clarify here, I am not referring to donated items from people towards an event (we enter these as Gift In Kind, and do NOT assign any donative value to their credit, as it is sticky with IRS - we encourage them to work with their financial advisor regarding any tax benefits) - I'm talking about event purchases that someone who participates pays, such as for tickets (ticket purchases usually have some quid pro quo, where they are paying for dinner or something along those lines), and auction purchases (if someone pays $150 for an auction item worth $100, they will be paying a quid pro quo of $100 and in turn only $50 above the donative value of the item, therefore, can only write off $50 of the donative purchase).


I know it's confusing :-/ We used to not include any event donors in ANY of our giving totals, and are now looking at how we can now include them, with the bugaboo being how to tally the Receipt Amount vs the Gift Amount.

Linda Burns

We enter purchases of auction items in our Auction constituent record as a cash gift, then link the gift to the Donations tab on the Event that's in the purchaser's record. These are not considered part of cumulative giving for the purchaser.


The only time a purchased item would be on the purchaser's gift tab is if it was a split receipt and we provided a charitable receipt for the portion above the value of the item.


Ticket purchases are recorded as a cash gift on the purchaser's record. These gifts are considered part of cumulative giving for donor wall purposes.

Christine Cooke

Have always entered them as regular cash gifts (I don't think 'other' was intended for what you are doing?)

Event(s) have their own Fund. I've worked where there was more than one event a year and where there has only been one. If there was more than one event a year, then each Event had their own Fund.


Makes it easy peasy to run reports and 'totals', lists etc and include exclude that information because you just include or exclude those Funds.


Why would you not consider them donors? They are supporting your organization, just not in the straightforward way of handing over a cash (no bennies) gift.

As far as recognizing them, if they've been recognized (wherever I've worked) it was separately from everyone else. The only ones that were included with outright donors were the ones that gave to the event and did not attend or gave to the fund-a-need portion of the event because those are outright gifts with not bennies so those folks are counted in cumulative giving.

Dan Snyder

Tracy Wittkopp:

I should clarify here, I am not referring to donated items from people towards an event (we enter these as Gift In Kind, and do NOT assign any donative value to their credit, as it is sticky with IRS - we encourage them to work with their financial advisor regarding any tax benefits) - I'm talking about event purchases that someone who participates pays, such as for tickets (ticket purchases usually have some quid pro quo, where they are paying for dinner or something along those lines), and auction purchases (if someone pays $150 for an auction item worth $100, they will be paying a quid pro quo of $100 and in turn only $50 above the donative value of the item, therefore, can only write off $50 of the donative purchase).


I know it's confusing :-/ We used to not include any event donors in ANY of our giving totals, and are now looking at how we can now include them, with the bugaboo being how to tally the Receipt Amount vs the Gift Amount.

Hi Tracy Wittkopp‍ we only have one regularly paid event which is a fundraiser for two specific scholarships, but we have recoded the full amount as the gift amount and the tax deducible amount as the receipt amount as you mentioned. We have still raised that money for scholarships and the donor still gave that much. The only time the difference becomes a big issue is with the VSE where we need to just report the deductible or receipt amount.

Carrie Aranda

We do something very similar... We have a campaign for Events and then each event has it's own fund. We use appeal to designate if it was a Silent Auction, Live Auction, Raffle, Donation, etc to the event. We can always filter those gifts out if needed because they have are tagged as an event (campaign), to an event (fund) or a specific piece of an event (appeal). This way we can include donations from an event but exclude Live Auction, Silent Auction, etc.


This also helps report on the different event revenue streams, i.e. how much for an event came in through the auction vs donations. It also came in handy during the pandemic when some of our events were cancelled. We looked at people who wrote checks for auction items and asked them for a straight donation. At least we had the data in RE to pull.

Sunshine Reinken Watson

We include event donations but not tickets, raffle, auction, or sponsorships as qualified donations for our donor society list. Each event has its own appeal and the packages under the appeal denote what type of transaction it is. Each package has a "package category" of donation, in-kind, tickets, raffle, auction, or sponsorship. I use "package category" to easily omit the categories that do not count toward the donor society list in my queries.