In-Kind Donations linking to an Event

Question

I’m trying to figure out the best way to track an in-kind donation of an event from a patron. For example, a patron may help us by allowing us to use their space to run a charity dinner.

I was thinking about creating a new financial type of ‘in-kind donation’, adding event details in the notes of the contribution itself… but I’d really like to properly link it to the event for reporting purposes? Should I set up a campaign, link both the donation and event to that in a custom field? I could therefore link several different types of in-kind donations to that event campaign as well.

Any help much appreciated.

Mike

Answer 1

2 solutions come to mind:

1. The traditional way would be to create 1 Campaign per Event. You do not need any custom fields for this, as both Events and Contributions can be associated with a Campaign. For clarity, give the Campaign the same name as your Event, then you can select the Campaign for every donation and it will effectively be linked to your Event (as both the event and the contribution will point to the same campaign).
2. A simpler alternative that requires less data-entry would be with a custom field linking the contribution directly to the event. You can create a new custom field of type "Entity Reference" that extends Contributions and references Events. This type of custom field is newly available in CiviCRM version 5.60.