The gala and the Saturday bird walk both have a date, a time, a price, and a guest list. In Altru, though, they can live in two very different places: the events area built for fundraising, and program events that hang off your ticketed programs. Pick the wrong one and you find out months later, when the development director can’t get a clean event report or the box office can’t sell the thing at the register.
The short version: if the point of the event is to raise money and steward relationships, use a fundraising event. If the point is to sell admission to a scheduled experience, use a program event. The rest of this article is about the cases where that rule gets fuzzy.
What each one is built for
Program events
A program event is a scheduled occurrence of a program: a specific date and time, with a capacity, sold using the program’s price types. Because it’s part of your ticketing setup, it fits into the same sales channels as the rest of your admissions, typically advance sales, daily sales, group sales, and your online ticketing web forms. Revenue lands as ticket or program revenue, and the ticket is something you can scan at the door.
Think tours, workshops, classes, lectures, behind-the-scenes encounters, film screenings, and holiday light nights. Anything you’d describe as “buy a ticket for the 2:00 slot.”
Fundraising events
Fundraising events are built around constituents rather than inventory. The tools center on invitations, registrants, registration options and fees, guests, and tracking what the event cost and raised. Revenue is tied to the event so development staff can report on it as fundraising, and the event becomes part of each attendee’s relationship history on their constituent record.
Think galas, donor receptions, benefit dinners, golf tournaments, cultivation events, and anything with a host committee or an invitation list.
Questions that settle it
- Who owns the event after it’s over? If development will report on it, thank attendees, and judge it by net revenue, lean toward a fundraising event. If visitor services or education owns it and judges it by attendance, lean toward a program event.
- How do people get in? An invitation list, RSVP, or registration with guests points to fundraising. A public ticket that anyone can buy points to a program.
- Where will it be sold? If frontline staff need to sell it at the register or alongside general admission, a program event keeps it inside the sales screens they already use. Confirm in your own setup how fundraising event registrations are taken at the desk and online before assuming they’ll work the same way.
- Does part of the price count as a gift? Benefit dinners usually have a fair market value and a deductible portion that needs to appear on acknowledgments. Make sure whichever approach you pick can produce the receipt language your finance team needs. Test this before launch rather than after the first donor asks.
- Do you need to track expenses and goals against the event? That kind of event-level budgeting is a fundraising use case.
The fuzzy middle
Member preview nights
Free or discounted for members, open to the public at a higher price, timed entry, scanned at the gate. This usually behaves like a program event. The membership benefit is handled through price types, and the guest flow is the same as any other ticketed night.
Lecture series with a donor reception
Split it. The lecture is a program event that anyone can buy. The pre-lecture reception for donors is a fundraising event with its own invitation list. Trying to make one record do both usually means one team ends up with data they can’t use.
A ticketed fundraiser sold to the public
A wine tasting or “zoo after dark” fundraiser sold to the general public is the hardest call. It raises money, but it sells like admission. Ask the first question again: who reports on it, and how? If development needs registrant-level history and event net revenue, build it as a fundraising event and work out the sales process up front. If the goal is mostly volume and the gift element is small, a program event with clear revenue coding may serve everyone better. Either way, decide together with finance and development before the record is created.
Mistakes worth avoiding
- Switching types midstream. Moving an event from one structure to the other after sales have started means reprocessing or reconciling transactions. Settle the type before the first sale.
- Letting each department choose by habit. Write a one-paragraph rule for your organization and share it with everyone who creates events.
- Forgetting the GL side. Program revenue and fundraising event revenue often map to different accounts. Check with finance which accounts each will hit so the monthly close doesn’t turn into a cleanup project.
- Not testing the full path. Before launch, run a test purchase or registration all the way through: sale, receipt or acknowledgment, the constituent record, and the report you’ll use afterward. A sandbox or a low-stakes test event is the safest place to try it.
When you’re not sure Altru supports your plan
Capabilities can vary with your configuration and the web forms you’ve set up, and Altru’s options for selling fundraising event registrations online aren’t identical to its ticketing forms. If your plan depends on a specific behavior, like selling gala seats at the front desk or applying a member discount to a registration fee, confirm it in a test environment or ask Blackbaud support before you announce the event. That fifteen-minute check is cheaper than rebuilding the event in the other structure later.
