How to easily manage and assign seating at your fundraising event
Seating charts at benefit auctions are not for the faint of heart. Who’s a guest of whom? Do you have all of their contact information? What about groups spanning multiple tables? And how do you get everyone from registration to their correct seat?
You don’t have to dread the seating chart with Greater Giving’s automated table seating tools. By selling your tickets and tables online through the Project Website—or by entering them manually into the Project database—you can manage all of your event registrations at once.
Everything you see here also works for fundraising events that involve teams instead of tables! Trying to find an easy way to place supporters into groups? Try out these useful group management features!
Collecting Guest Information and RSVPs
Obtaining information about each and every one of your guests is key, not only to assigning seats at your event, but also to building out your supporter database for receipts, thank-you letters, and all future communications.
Often, sponsors and table purchasers don’t have all of their guest names and contact info upon purchase. But with Greater Giving’s new RSVP feature, collecting sponsor guest and table guest information is easier than ever. RSVP provides them a unique link so they can come back to the website at any time to fill in attendee information, or even allow their guests to go and enter it themselves.
You can automatically generate and send emails containing these links to ticketed guests and sponsors, so they can fill out their guest lists on their own schedule.
The best part? Speed up your registration exponentially by allowing guests to enter and save their credit card information in advance of the event! Saved credit cards can be used on the night of the event to pay for any purchases made during your fundraiser.
Encourage guests to pre-register their credit cards, and to build up some extra excitement, include a link to your online auction so they can browse auction items in advance of the event.
Automatic Seating Chart Management
In Greater Giving, managing table assignments is as simple as a button-click. With the Manage Tables feature, you can automatically assign guests to tables based on who purchased their ticket, their sponsor affiliation, and the size of each table.
- All sponsor guests will be seated together at the sponsor’s in-kind tables.
- All guests of a ticket buyer will be seated together, when possible.
- Choose to seat certain individuals or couples together.
- Feel free to make changes afterward to customize and tweak your seating assignments.
How do I use Manage Tables?
- Make sure you have good data to work with before automatically assigning guests to tables with the Manage Tables function. That means correctly entering sponsorship information (with the number of tables and seats included in their benefits), as well as all individual ticket and table purchases.
- Enter the number of tables you plan to have, and the average number of seats at each table. You can make all tables the same size by default, then modify individual tables that have more or fewer seats.
- Simply click Assign to Tables to automatically place bidders at tables according to the rules above!
Track Meal Options and Selections
You can even include meal selections for ticketed guests with your unique RSVP link! Allow guests to choose their meal from a drop-down list of options, and it will be saved automatically to their attendee profile in the Project database.
Automatically Generate Seating Charts, Reports, and More
Once all of your guest information is collected and attendees are assigned to tables, Greater Giving can generate your guest lists, table lists, meal selections, and more. Simply use our easy Reports function and choose the list of your choice, and it will populate automatically with all of your entered guest information!
Make the process even easier by registering and ticketing guests online using your Project Website! The built-in website feature allows you to sell tickets easily. All guest information collected on the website is automatically imported into your event database for future use. This feature helps build out your nonprofit’s contact list for future events and calls to action!
