How To Track Donations
When you want to track how well your donations are doing for an auction event you will have to also look at how you are receiving, or will be receiving, those donations. Essentially, you will be manually recording donations and/or you will be receiving donations from bidders on your auction website.
Pre-Requisites
- Auctria Auction Website (see How To Create A New Auction Website if needed)
- Donation Item(s) (optional - see Donation Items as needed)
- Add New Items (optional - see Add New Item as needed)
How To Record A Donation
There are three basic methods to record a donation using Auctria.
- Manually record the donations via the auction dashboard using the Record Donation function;
- Provide a Donation Element on the auction website for your guests to pledge an amount; or,
- Manually enter a Donor Donation (non-item donation) using the Add New Donation function.
∞ Donation Element
∞ Add New Donation
Via The Auction Dashboard
For donations recorded Via The Auction Dashboard, you would use the Record Donation function. This will allow you to record a Cash Donation or a donation directly associated with a Donation Item.
∞ Record DonationVia The Auction Website
For donations recorded Via The Auction Website, your Bidders would be using a Donation element configured in either Cash Donation or Donation Item mode. This would assign the donations in the same manner as if you manually recorded them using the Record Donation function.
∞ Donation Element∞ How To Add A Donation Page
Donor Donations
For Donor Donations, or those donations that are not associated with an item being made available for bidding or purchase, you can use the Add New Donation function. This will create a Donor record (saved to the Organization) as well as potentially adding the Donor to those being displayed on the auction website via the Donor Catalog element.
INFORMATION
Using the Add New Donation function will require a separate report to view the records of these donations. Something to consider before using this option is if it would be better to create a Bidder Record for the donor and use the Record Donation function as described above.
Reporting On The Donations
When Reporting On The Donations you will have to know if you have both Bidder donations and Donor donations. If you only have Bidder Donations then you only need to run one report to see all of the donations that were made by bidders.
The Reports can be found from the main Auction Dashboard board and then clicking on the Financial tab to locate the Income reports.
Donations Made By Bidders
Reports > Financial | Income > Bidder Donations
This report will display all of the bidder donations, both their Cash donations and the donations recorded on Donation Items.
Donations Made By Donors
Reports > Financial | Income > Donor Donations
This report will display all of the bidder donations, both their Cash donations and their pledges on Donation Items.
Merge Bidder And Donor Donations
In the case where you have both Bidder and Donor donations and you want to see those numbers combined you will need to Export both donation "Reports" in XLS formatted files and merge (external to Auctria) them together using an appropriate spreadsheet application.
Deciding to only use the Bidder Record approaches (providing for bidders to use the auction website or using the Record Donation function) for cash donations and donation pledged to Donation Items will save this extra work.
Recommended Reading
Reviewed: January 2023