Tracking Appropriate Event Purchases

Miki Martin

I have been all set to track everything for our upcoming Gala in RE, as in the past most of it has been tracked via spreadsheets besides actual check/CC donations. However, I am getting overwhelmed with what I am trying to learn here in Community.

This Gala is an annual event. We have a raffle, which I am tracking with a different fund so we can get numbers by class. We have many other pre-event things to purchase: event tickets, first choice raffle (1/125 chance of having name pulled and you get your choice of item before it's auctioned), golden ticket (1/125 chance of having name pulled to win one of three items). I'm seeing people mention fair market value and/or to deduct benefits. How do I determine what that is for these things? Should these purchases be in a separate fund since they ARE purchases and not a direct donation to school?

Along those same lines, what do you all do with auction items purchased? Do you enter those in RE? We have baskets that are a raffle plus various auctioned items, either silent or live. How do we track these in RE (to date we have not even recorded in RE the in kind donations for these auction items, FYI, although I would love to do that, as well)? We do not have any electronic reconciliation with Finance so it's all print a report to balance each month, besides my weekly deposit of gift donations.

I know there's a lot to unpack here and I apologize. I just could not quite get my questions answered when I tried to look. Thank you all!

Kylea Johnson

Galas are hard! It takes me a very long time to reconcile after the gala. Here's the methods I use for those:

Raffles – in my state there are a lot of gambling laws so check your local nonprofit raffle/gambling laws. I do not record raffle ticket purchases as donations, so they don't touch RE. We deposit that income and our accountants record it to the Gala fund as ‘sales’.

Silent Auction Items Donated to You - I record these as ‘in kind gifts’. It's important to note that it is the DONOR'S responsibility to attach a value. So, if they don't specify a dollar amount the item is worth, I just record it as the item name and send an in kind gift thank you note that says “thank you for your donation of a basket to our Gala containing etc”. If they do specify a value I put “thank you for your donation of a basket valued at $100 to our annual Gala”.

Silent Auction Items Purchased at Event - Estimate or use the donor's supplied value for each of the auction items. Put that value on your bid sheets. If a donor purchases an item for an amount OVER the value, just receipt the amount they paid over the value of the item. If not, it's not a donation it's a purchase. So, if I bought a painting at the auction that was VALUED at $100, but I bought it for $200, then I made a $100 donation to you. I would send a receipt for the $100 along with a note explaining why you did that. If I only paid $50 then I did not make a donation, it was just a sale. If you put the item value on the bid sheet, they will probably be able to piece it together that they donated the amount over the value.

Gala Tickets – Tickets to our gala are $50. The cost each for the dinners is $28, so everyone gets a receipted value of $22/seat. Sometimes you kind of have to estimate the benefits value, check the IRS requirements. For this, I set up a default benefit under the ‘packages’ section of appeals so that Raisers Edge does all that work for me and receipts folks at $22/seat automatically.

PS-Instead of Funds you might want to use “Packages” under “Appeals” to separate all the different types of purchases one might make at the Gala. Totally depends on how your database is set up but Packages allows you to pre-set a lot of options and keep everything under one “appeal” umbrella. = )