Articles

Non-profits rely on fundraising events to help them meet their mission’s goals, but a successful event requires extensive planning and careful management. Using an event planning and management system can streamline the planning process and let you manage all aspects of the event from one location. 

Large or small there is a planning and management system that is perfect for your organization. In order to choose the one best suited to your organization you need to determine your needs.

For example, if your organization only hosts a few small fundraising events, you could use an online service such as Eventbrite to track event participation and collect payments. 

Eventbrite’s online service lets you create events, register attendees and collect payments. In addition, Eventbrite can post your event to Eventful or Google calendar. Eventbrite is fairly stripped down, but it does offer you some options to customize your registration form and it can share information with Salesforce databases. 

Eventbrite processes payments through Paypal or Google checkout and they do charge a processing fee in addition to the fees charged by Google or Paypal. 

For organizations that are in the market for a donor management platform, in addition to an event planning and management program should consider NeonCRM. In addition to helping you manage your donors, it includes an event management module that interacts with its centralized database so all your reporting information is in one place. 

NeonCRM event planning and management module lets you create an unlimited number of events, process entry fees, track attendance, and gather important constituent information.  

If you want a more robust system that lets you create multiple events, track attendance and collect constituent information consider a dedicated event planning and management platform like Cvent.

Cvent offers a variety of features to automate time consuming tasks associated with planning an event. It also lets you create a customized event website and send event marketing emails. 

Along with processing payments, Cvent has event-reporting features to let your track your event fees and tabulate your donations. On event day, you can use Cvent’s OnArrival check-in app to make the check in process go smooth. 

If you plan, many large-scale events consider Planning Pod. Planning Pod’s event software tools is cloud-based. You can access it via the internet from any device including computers, tablets or mobile device. 

It takes a village to put on a successful event, with Planning Pod you can invite an unlimited number of users to collaborate with you.

Use Planning Pod for every aspect of your event, from making the budget to creating a floor plan. Say good-bye to paper checklists you can use Planning Pod to track venues, catering / food-and-beverage, and the speakers or entertainment.

Use it to create an event registration, build a flexible registration form, manage ticketed / registered attendees; revise registrations; and manually process registrations.

• Prev