I am cleaning up and to a degree re-implementing Salesforce for a very new non-profit, Brigid's Path. Our focus right now is on fundraising so that we can open our doors. I have pretty solid grasp on how I'm going to do donation and grant management but I'm struggling a bit with how I should approach events. We have had a variety of events either held by us or by other organizations with us as the benefactor. For some we have done online pre-sales tickets through Yapsody, worked with larger organizations who have sponsored the event and sent out email blasts through MailChimp. Others are much smaller in scale, a different organization may hold an event in our honor and just give us the proceeds. Some of these events we will raise funds through ticket sales as well as activities at the event like raffle sales.
We have a very low budget for third party software, and with all the complexities we're working through in the other operational areas I want to keep the Salesforce architecture as simple and out of the box as possible. I really would just like to be able to know who attended what events and how profitable each one was.
The previous Salesforce administrator had several different custom opportunity records types. I think I want to flatten this structure and just use a standard donation as much as possible and leverage the campaign functionality more. He had created record types for "Cash received at event", "Event Attendee", "Event Sponsor" this seems like too much custom complexity for this.
Does anyone have experience with leveraging the core NPSP functionality or free third party apps for these types of event management with some tips they could share?
