Building Community & Raising Funds: Managing Events and Fundraising Workflows with Powerbase

Description

Engaging our communities and raising revenue are core pieces of our organizing work. There are countless ways that Powerbase can support your fundraising and your events planning and management. From holding membership meetings, to creating and managing complex galas, accepting simple donations online to creating complex multi-step fundraising campaigns from beginning to end, we'll cover all of this and more in this three-day, online training session. Whether your work intersects both fundraising and events, or focuses on one or the other, so many of the workflows are similar and this training will be useful to you. Prerequisite: comfortable with logging into Powerbase, general navigation and creating and using groups

Agenda

Training materials, including login information on the training database will be sent to everyone who is registered.

Day 1: The Big Picture, fundraising and events preparation and basics

11:00 am Central Time (for 120 minutes)

• Community Agreements and Introductions - A, J
• Orientation - A
  • Review agenda
  • Introduce network site and training site
  • Logging in and getting around: Hand out usernames and passwords
• What's a "page"? - N
  • Manage/View existing contribution pages and event pages
  • Creating: new event page, new contribution page: brief intro, focus on:
    • Profiles: choose defaults for now, more later
    • Accessing the link to the page itself
    • Creating an Event screencast: screen cast
    • Creating an Online Contribution page screencast: screen cast
• Practice time: create a simple event and/or contribution page - N
• One off's - J
  • You don't need a contribution page to record a one off mail in donation: screen cast
  • You can manually register a person for an event - screen cast
  • You don't need an event to record attendance at a meeting, you can use an activity: screen cast
• Campaigns: unify! One campaign for both contributions and event attendance screen cast - J
• Payment Processors: needed to accept both donations and event registration fees - N
  • Choosing a payment processor
  • Configuring payment processors
• Practice Time - choose your adventure:
  • Create one meeting activity that includes 3 contacts
  • Manually record a check contribution for a random contact
  • Manually register a random someone for an event (either an event you set up or any event you find in the database)
  • Create a campaign in the database

Day 2: Collecting more information from donors and event attendees, searching and reporting and accepting payments

11:00 am Central Time (for 120 minutes)

• Welcome, agenda review and getting logged in - N
• Questions before we begin - N
• Fundraising Workflow Basics - A
  • Planning and managing your fundraising campaigns
  • Powerbase fundraising packet see fundraising packet
  • Fundraising planning worksheets - also in packet
  • Donor tracking fields
  • Search and Segment your donors with groups (p64 in fundraising packet)
    • Major Donors, potential donors, recurring donors
    • Recurring donor group screen cast
  • Fundraising reports
    • Key numbers report - screen cast
    • Lapsed donors via Donor Behavior report - screen cast
    • SYBUNT Report (donors who gave Some Year But Unfortunately Not This Year) - tip sheet
    • Tip sheet: useful contribution reports
    • Tip sheet: basics of creating a contribution report
    • Adding any report to your Dashboard screen cast
  • Additional Resources:
    • Mimi Ho Article on Grassroots Fundraising Strategies
• Event Workflow Basics - J
  • Register a group of people for an event on the back end screen cast
  • Create a registration report screen cast
  • Take attendance during an event with civiMobile screen cast
  • Update participant status from registered to attended (enter paper sign in sheet) screen cast
  • Alternative to Paper Sign-in Sheets: Form Builder - tipsheet
    • Importing sign-in spreadsheets from an event - screen cast
  • Report: show attendance by event screen cast
• Summary fields for contributions and events - J
  • What are summary fields and how do we use them for events and contributions?
  • Why event and financial types are useful for configuring summary fields to track engagement screen cast
• Practice searches - N
  • Enter in Chat: How many people have either registered or attended an event in the last year?
  • Enter in Chat: How many people have attended an event in the last 90 days?
  • Enter in Chat: How many people have a completed contribution in the last 6 months?
  • Enter in Chat: Has anyone made more than two contributions this fiscal year?
    • Find everyone who has attended an event in the last year - screen cast
    • Search for everyone who has made a contribution in the last 6 months - screen cast
• Testing: How to test your event and contribution pages without using a real credit card - A
• Practice - choose your adventure:
  • Create a group or groups of donors you want to engage during a fundraising campaign
  • Create a group of contacts you want to invite to an event
  • Create a fundraising report or event report
  • Manually take attendance for an event
  • Register a group of people for an event from the back end

Day 3: Rounding out our events and our fundraising campaigns

12:00 pm Central Time (approximately 120 minutes)

• Review questions from homework or from yesterday - A
• Evaluations - A
• Price Fields - Complex method: use when you need it! - J
  • But... What if your event has multiple paid parts - for example, a fee for optional dinner? What if you want to offer folks the chance to make an optional donation in addition to the registration fee? What if you want folks to buy more than one ticket? See tip sheet on sponsorships and tables
  • Pricesets to the rescue! - screen cast
• Sprint Campaigns - see Introducing Sprint Fundraising Campaigns by PTP and Rebecca Johnson - A
  • Iowa CCI Spring Campaign Case Study
• Personal Campaign Pages aka Peer-to-peer campaigns (PCP) - J tip sheet
  • Sample PCP page
  • Configuring a contribution page to enable PCPs
  • What it looks like to the PCP page creators and how to approve them
• Practice: Choose your own adventure! - A
  • Scenario 1: Create an event with price sets that require one of four different entry prices along with one of two main dish prices that are optional.
  • Scenario 2: Create a price set with four different entry prices plus an optional donation
  • Scenario 3: Via the backend, register three people for the event. Then, find them and update their status from registered to attended.
  • Scenario 4: Assign a meeting activity to multiple people in the database.
  • Scenario 5: Create a contribution page with the Personal Campaign Page option enabled
  • Scenario 6: Via the backend, manually record a check contribution
• End of Year & Thank You letters - N
  • Creating Thank you letters for specific contributions - screencast
    • See this document for more details on creating thank you letters
    • HINT: Use Schedule Reminders to automate sending thank you letters to those who donated on an online contribution page - screen cast
    • NOTE: there is an extension (Mosaico Message Template extension) that allows you to use your Mosaico templates and it converts it to traditional HTML email templates
  • Creating EOY Tax letters - screen cast
    • Summary Fields - screen cast
    • See this tip sheet for more details on creating EOY donor letters
    • Sending EOY Tax letters via Email tip sheet
• Wrap-up and Final Questions - A

Additional Resources

• Extra Fee Amount to offer option to pay credit card fees - tip sheet
• Using Search Kit for more complex searches and options to display your data - tip sheet and screen cast