Recording Sponsorships & Prizes

All Sponsorships can be recorded through the Sponsors campaign. Sponsorships might come in the form of Gifts-in-Kind or Cash. Your event is considered a marketing opportunity on the part of these sponsors and you can provide them with a Non-Charitable Receipt or no receipt at all just a thank you letter.

Sponsorships are different than donations. Sponsorships are usually acquired by a Sponsorship Committee. The dollar ranges for sponsorship are defined by levels and have benefits attached to them. These benefits need to be managed carefully to ensure that sponsors gain value from your event.

Recommendation: We suggest that you set up a table listing all the things your organization plans to do for sponsors of different levels. These items will make up row descriptions and reside in column one. The remaining columns will be used to identify each of your sponsors. A simple 'X' will mark those things that need to be done for each sponsor at each level. A grid of this sort helps to prevent confusion and ensures you have everything in order.

Alternatively, Dickens can be used to record your commitments to your Sponsors to ensure the charity completes all the agreed aspects of the sponsorship.

The Mailing List field displays the sponsorship level. This is particularly convenient for any communications with sponsors such as invoicing, event listings, table identifiers, recognition lists and thank you letters.

The moment you have a commitment from a sponsor is your opportunity to enter the sponsor and the dollar amount into @EASE with a payment method of Pledge. With this information, you can use Q-Xpress to extract the most current list of new sponsors with their sponsorship level and send an invoice.

Upon receipt of the invoiced amount, assuming a cash sponsorship, you can update the record to a paid status.

Here is a sample sponsorship entry.

Features to Note:

Upon selecting the 2015 Gala Sponsors campaign all default values populated the receipt fields.

The company is identified along with the contact person who is responsible for authorizing the sponsorship.

Initially, the Payment Method would show Pledge telling us they have agreed to be a sponsor but the money has not yet been received. A record where the payment method is Pledge sits in wait mode. It cannot be updated to master ... it simply waits until the dollars have arrived.

Using Q-Xpress, Receipting Amount Payment Method Date, we can extract all Pledge payment methods for this campaign by date range ... and merge the information into an invoice for mailing.

The Mailing List field shows this donor to be a Platinum Sponsor. This piece of information will always accompany this donation record. Whenever the record is exported, the opportunity exists to use this information for communication purposes.

The letter is NoLetter.

Once Payment Arrives

When the cheque arrives, locate this receipt transaction record:
Update the payment method to cheque,
Update the Receipt Date and Date Received,
Update the Batch Number to correspond with the bank deposit, and
Save the changes.

Prizes are entered in much the same way as Sponsorships. The Payment method, however, would be gift-in-kind. The Receipt Notes area would describe the prize.