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Every nonprofit organization I’ve ever been involved with (and there have been quite a few over the years!) planned at least one major annual event. Many of these organizations kept their event information in a spreadsheet, separate from their donor information. So when it came time to plan an event we were blind to our invitees’ level of engagement with the organization, as well as their attendance at or participation in past events. All of this made it harder to maximize the success of the events.
If any of this strikes a chord with you, I’m glad you’re here! Because in this article, I’ll share how using Little Green Light can help you manage your events more efficiently and effectively.
Whenever you’re hosting an event and want to manage an invitation list, RSVP responses, and attendance, or even if you just want to document who made donations or purchases as part of an event, then Little Green Light’s Events feature fits the bill.
Using LGL’s search functionality, you can create searches to locate the exact constituents you want to include at each event. For instance, you may want to invite everyone who attended any event you held last year, or really get specific and build a segmented list. Segments might include:
The benefit of creating segments is that you can send personalized communications to each segment, increasing the likelihood that those invitees will attend.
Image: Sample event segments in Little Green Light
Another benefit of managing your invitation lists in LGL is that you’ll create a history of how each constituent responds to your invitations. Over time, you’ll know who is most engaged and who may no longer be a good prospect.
Communicating with your event participants is key to a successful event. Whether you need to generate mailing labels for your printed invitations or want to send email followups to your registrants, you can do so in Little Green Light.
One great benefit of using the built-in mailing and emailing functionality in LGL is that a record of each communication is automatically added to the record of every constituent who received that communication. So, whenever you view a constituent record, you’ll quickly be able to see if they’ve been invited to the event, their response to the invitation, as well as any communications you sent regarding the event. And, in the case of email communications, you’ll even be able to see if they opened your email and clicked on a link. What a great way to measure your invitees’ engagement with your organization!
Image: Event and email activity tracked in a Little Green Light constituent record
When your event requires payment for a ticket or you simply want to keep count of who’s planning to attend, you’ll save a lot of time by using LGL Forms to manage your event.
The benefits of using online forms are two-fold: first, they make it easy for your participants to respond, and second, they make it simple to collect information that can be synced automatically to your Little Green Light database. No need to manually enter each response or ticket purchase. Just set up the mapping on your form to do this for you automatically.
Image: Syncing a form to Little Green Light
If you want to collect extra information about your attendees, such as their meal preference or T-shirt size, you can do that by customizing your event in LGL and mapping your registration form so the data transfers seamlessly to your LGL account. Here’s how.
Of course, invite lists and RSVPs are only one part of the event picture. Tracking pledges, gifts (including in-kind donations of goods and services), sponsorships, and even advertisements are an important piece of the puzzle. In Little Green Light, you can always have an up-to-the-minute total of attendees and donations.
It’s yet another reason that managing your event in LGL makes perfect sense. All of Little Green Light’s gift tracking and reporting features are built into our event functionality as well, so you can stay on top of how well your event is doing—even how it compares to previous events.
Image: Event dashboard in Little Green Light
Interested in learning more about managing events in Little Green Light? Check out our Knowledge Base article, Managing events in LGL: Step by step or join a Customer Q&A to ask questions about your specific event by registering for a session on the Help page in your account.
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This is terrific! We have held an annual membership meeting for two years running and also created a new sponsors event, specifically for our major donors. Having this capability in LGL will be a tremendous help. I would be interested in learning more how to create and manage this aspect. We have yet to incorporate the use of email into our database