Recording raffle ticket sales

Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn
Third Anniversary Participant
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

I need to track the sales of raffle tickets. The problem is when John Doe sells ten $5 tickets, that $50 was not his money, but I want it credited to him. I thought of logging them as gifts, but that doesn't seem right since it's not the seller's money, and I certainly can't log each individual ticket and then soft credit the seller.

I want to log big batches of tickets when a seller turns in money for sometimes hundreds of tickets.

Each seller belongs to an area and a team and I need to do reporting… the person before me was using a Filemaker database which looks like it was created in the mid 80s… I know Access could do the same thing, but it doesn't make sense to have a huge, expensive database (RE-NXT) at my fingertips and not use it.

Ideas??

Comments

  • Faith Murray
    Faith Murray Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    @Susan Quinn, if you have decided that you definitely want this credited to the donor who gathers the ticket sales, then my suggestion would be to post the collective amount ($100 for 20 tickets, etc) to Anonymous, and then soft-credit the donor from there. It sounds like you're not really needing to track the purchaser's names in RE, just the collecting donor's?

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 January 2026 Monthly Challenge 2025 bbcon Attendee Badge

    @Susan Quinn Welcome to the BB Community forums.

    Honestly, if I was having to track raffle ticket sales I would do it outside of RE.

    Rationale:
    1. As you said not the sellers money.
    2. Entering every ticket purchaser enormous task even when people already in your db
    3. $ is not a donation and can be messy if on records when running LTG/FY summary etc for the constituent who sold or purchased. Even SC can be an issue when running reports.

    I would really think through the long-term implications of having this on RE records.

    Just my opinion - maybe you'll have a reply from someone who does enter them and how they deal with it. ?

  • Karen Diener
    Karen Diener
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    @Susan Quinn:

    I need to track the sales of raffle tickets. The problem is when John Doe sells ten $5 tickets, that $50 was not his money, but I want it credited to him. I thought of logging them as gifts, but that doesn't seem right since it's not the seller's money, and I certainly can't log each individual ticket and then soft credit the seller.

    I want to log big batches of tickets when a seller turns in money for sometimes hundreds of tickets.

    Each seller belongs to an area and a team and I need to do reporting… the person before me was using a Filemaker database which looks like it was created in the mid 80s… I know Access could do the same thing, but it doesn't make sense to have a huge, expensive database (RE-NXT) at my fingertips and not use it.

    Ideas??

    If you do use RE, definitely do NOT soft credit the seller for the ticket sale. This is exactly what the Gift Solicitor field is for. As you said, not the seller's money. You could still add to an Anonymous record, but since raffle ticket sales have not been added to RE before, you'd need to think about gift coding and when you need to remove these gifts from queries and reports. Make sure the Receipt Amount field is changed to $0 since raffle ticket sales are not deductible.

    There is Solicitor Hierarchy functionality in RE but I've never needed to use it. You can assign a Solicitor to a Gift without assigning them to the Constituent record on the Relationships tab, but I'm not sure if the hierarchy would work in that situation.

    I don't know the volume of sales though it sounds like it can be large. If your organization refuses to add raffle tickets to RE I would probably use Excel and maybe a pivot table to group by team.

    Karen

  • Kenneth Jimah
    Kenneth Jimah
    Sixth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    @Susan Quinn I would agree with Faith's earlier reply. It's much cleaner and easier to record the lump sums on Anonymous Record or your Organisation's record on RE and then soft credit the seller from there. The flexibility of RE means you can use the CRM in a way that best suits your organisation; which is why I would not use 'Solicitor' for this especially if you want to easily query the income/seller performance in the future.

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