Event Tools for a Successful Gala Training Webinar
A successful gala depends on good tools for selling tickets, managing guest lists, organizing your event, and extras like a silent auction. EventSnap handles the ticketing side — a dedicated event website, individual and group tickets, sponsorships, merchandise, and guest registration — while AuctionSnap handles mobile bidding, live auction items, and checkout from a guest’s phone. Both are separate products from DonorSnap that integrate directly with your DonorSnap database, and both can be purchased on their own.
In this webinar we cover:
- Broadcast messaging, Excel reports, and integrating results back into DonorSnap
- What the ticket-buying experience looks like for your guests, from landing page to checkout
- Setting up individual tickets, free tickets, group tickets, sponsorships, and merchandise
- Promo codes, processing-fee coverage, and Stripe payment options
- Collecting meal choices, t-shirt sizes, and allergies through guest registration
- Building your event landing page with the Event Page Builder
- Guest check-in, walk-up registration, and organizing tables with Group Maintenance
- How guests bid on their phones, get outbid alerts, and check out at the end of the night
- Manual bid entry, winning bid entry for live auctions and paddle raises, and admin checkout
Quick recap
The trainer walked through EventSnap and AuctionSnap from the perspective of hosting a gala, showing both the guest experience and the admin side of each product. She started on the guest-facing event website, moving through ticket selection, merchandise, the shopping cart, promo codes, Stripe checkout, and the registration step where a purchaser names the guests attending on their tickets. She then moved to the auction site, showing mobile bidding, outbid alerts, and phone checkout at the close of the auction. On the admin side, she covered the event dashboard, ticket setup and inventory tracking, promo codes, user-defined fields, the Event Page Builder, transactions, guest check-in, and Group Maintenance for tables. She closed with the auction admin tools — manual bid entry, winning bid entry, stored credit cards, and broadcast messaging — plus reporting, DonorSnap integration, and pricing.
Summary
How EventSnap and AuctionSnap Work Together
The trainer opened by clarifying that EventSnap and AuctionSnap are partner products but not the same program. EventSnap is the ticketing side; AuctionSnap is the bidding side. Each can be purchased on its own, and there is a discount for buying both. The admin login includes both products, with green setup buttons appearing only for the products your organization subscribes to. DonorSnap is the CRM database product in the family, and both event tools integrate directly with it. Organizations that use a different CRM can export everything to Excel instead. Inside the admin, a single organization can hold many events at once — some with only ticketing, some with only an auction, and some with both.
The Guest-Facing Event Site, URL, and QR Code
When you create an event, EventSnap builds a standalone website for it and generates its own URL automatically, in the form of your organization’s subdomain plus your event name. It also creates a QR code for that URL immediately, ready to drop into printed invitations and other marketing. The trainer explained that the site works as a website in its own right and can be linked back to your organization’s main site. You build the landing page yourself from a supplied template, and you choose which buttons appear at the bottom — typically buy tickets, access the auction, and donate now. The donate button bypasses ticket selection and sends the visitor straight to the cart. Every page is mobile optimized and resizes for phones, tablets, and desktops.
Selling Tickets, Sponsorships, and Merchandise
The guest-facing ticketing site carries a consistent set of tabs across the top: Tickets, Merchandise, Cart, and Registration. Every event gets all of these tabs; any you aren’t using simply appear grayed out. On the Tickets tab you can offer individual paid tickets, individual free tickets, and group tickets. A table purchase, for example, might bundle eight individual tickets. Sponsorships that include seats are also built as group tickets. The Merchandise tab covers anything else you want to sell alongside admission — the trainer’s examples included centerpiece sponsorships, song requests from the band, water bottles, and t-shirts. Selections from both tabs accumulate in a running shopping cart total displayed at the bottom of the screen.
The Cart, Promo Codes, and Stripe Checkout
The cart itemizes everything the guest has selected — tickets, sponsorships, and merchandise — and offers a field to add an extra donation on top. Promo codes are supported here, which is how you handle early bird pricing or member pricing. There is also a checkbox letting the purchaser cover credit card processing fees; you decide in setup whether that box arrives pre-checked or unchecked. Payment runs through Stripe, since EventSnap and AuctionSnap are not credit card processors themselves. Guests can pay by card, by bank account, or through Google Pay and Apple Pay, all managed on the Stripe side. The trainer noted that a Stripe account is therefore a prerequisite for collecting money through the event site.
Guest Registration and User-Defined Fields
Registration is a separate step that happens after checkout, and the trainer stressed that this distinction matters. The person with the credit card and the people actually attending are often not the same. A purchaser who buys a sponsorship covering several seats completes payment first, then moves to the Registration tab to say who is coming and to answer questions about each attendee. Those questions are configured in the admin as user-defined fields, and typically cover meal choice, dietary restrictions and allergies, and t-shirt size. Anything you need to know about individual attendees goes here rather than in the cart. This produces two distinct groups of people in your records — ticket purchasers and guests — which the admin tools track separately.
Setting Up an Event: Tickets, Inventory, and Promo Codes
The admin side opens onto the dashboard, organized to follow the lifecycle of an event: setup at the top, then activity, then reports, then integration. Ticket setup comes first. You create a single ticket type, name it, set its price, and set a quantity — EventSnap tracks that quantity as live inventory, so if your room holds 176 seats it will count down as tickets sell. Only after the base individual ticket exists can you build group tickets on top of it, such as a Bronze Sponsorship that includes two seats and four drink tickets. Group inventory is tracked separately, so 22 available tables decrements as sponsorships sell. Promo codes can take a percentage off an entire order or apply only to specific items.
Building the Landing Page with the Event Page Builder
The Event Page Builder is where you construct the public landing page, and the trainer flagged it as the most time-consuming part of setup — as well as the most creative. It ships with a template containing multiple sections: headers, a spot for your logo, a central information block, a sponsor recognition area, and a section about your organization. You can accept the template, customize it heavily, or delete it entirely and drop in a single designed image. Editing controls sit on the right side of the screen, where you can add content, add rows, adjust settings, drag in additional buttons, and add as many images as you need. Buttons can point anywhere, including back to pages on your own website.
Managing Transactions, Guests, Check-In, and Tables
Once tickets start selling, the activity tools take over. Event Transactions lists everything that has come through, and a green add button lets you enter transactions manually — useful when a sponsor mails a check rather than paying online. You can view tickets sold, view guests, send emails to ticket purchasers only or to purchasers and guests together, and check people in at the door by ticking a box. If a purchaser never told you who they were bringing, you can register the walk-up guest at the door, attach them to the purchaser’s table, and capture their meal choice and allergies at that moment. Group Maintenance then lets you build and rename tables or golf foursomes and move people between groups.
Mobile Bidding and the Guest Auction Experience
AuctionSnap is a visually distinct program with its own URL, separate from the ticketing site. Your auction items are uploaded ahead of time with images, and guests log in from their phones during the event to bid. The interface gives immediate feedback: an item you are currently winning displays in green, and being outbid triggers a red arrow alert. Items designated as bid-at-event appear in the app with photos but cannot be bid on online — these are your live auction lots and paddle raise opportunities, listed so guests know what is coming later in the evening. When the auction closes at the time you set, bidding stops and AuctionSnap emails every participant to tell them what they won.
Running the Auction: Manual Bids, Live Items, and Checkout
The auction admin follows the same setup-activity-reports-integration flow. Setup covers building each item and uploading sponsor logos. During the event, manual bid entry handles guests who don’t have a phone or simply prefer to hand you a bid, and bid maintenance lets you correct an amount someone entered by mistake. An auction status screen shows where every item stands. Winning bid entry is how you record live auction results and paddle raise commitments; recording a winner drops the item into that person’s cart so they can pay on their phone. Admins also have a checkout screen for guests paying at a table — look up the bidder, deselect anything they’ve changed their mind about, and record a check or a card. If bidders stored a credit card when setting up their bidding preferences, admins can charge that card at checkout.
Communication Tools, Reports, and DonorSnap Integration
An attendee asked whether the communication tools cost extra; they don’t, and are included with the product. There are two channels. In-app broadcast messages pop up on the phones of guests who currently have the auction open — handy for announcements like ten minutes remaining on a particular table of items. Text messages go through each recipient’s normal phone messaging instead. Which channel a person receives depends on the communication preferences they set when they registered to bid, since they opt in themselves. Reports on both the event and auction sides export to Excel for tasks like name tags and ticket buyer lists. The final step is pushing results back into DonorSnap through the direct integration, or exporting to Excel for a different CRM.
Cloning Events, Pricing, and Getting a Demo
The admin dashboard gives each event its own tile showing event dates, the event link and QR code, the auction link and QR code, guests purchased, bidders signed up, ticket revenue, and total collected. Events can be cloned, so an annual gala doesn’t have to be rebuilt from scratch each year, and finished events can be disabled to keep the list manageable. The trainer’s recommended practice is to create the event with its name and date, clone it, experiment freely in the clone, then disable the clone once you’re satisfied. Each product can be purchased on its own, with a discount when both are bought together; current pricing is listed on EventSnap.com and AuctionSnap.com. Sales demos can cover both products in one session.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I have to buy both EventSnap and AuctionSnap? No. They are partner products but separate purchases, and either one works on its own. If you only need ticketing, buy EventSnap; if you only run auctions, buy AuctionSnap. The two producst share the admin login area, but the green setup buttons only appear for what you’ve subscribed to. There is a discounted price when you purchase the two together.
How much do EventSnap and AuctionSnap cost? Current pricing for both products is listed on EventSnap.com and AuctionSnap.com. Each product is sold as an annual subscription and can be purchased on its own, and buying both together costs less than two separate subscriptions. Because the right fit depends on the kinds of events you run, the trainer recommended scheduling a demo with the sales team — one session can cover both products, so you don’t need to book two.
Do EventSnap and AuctionSnap integrate with DonorSnap? Yes. Both products integrate directly with DonorSnap, and pushing your event and auction results back into your database is the final step in each product’s workflow. If your organization uses a different CRM, every report also exports to Excel, so the data can still be brought into another system manually.
Do I need my own website to sell gala tickets? No. EventSnap builds a complete standalone event website and generates its own URL and a QR code as soon as you create the event. You can link to it from your organization’s website, or use the QR code in printed invitations and promotional materials. You can also add buttons on the event landing page pointing back to pages on your own site.
How do I sell a table or a sponsorship that includes multiple tickets? Create the individual ticket first, then build a group ticket based on it. Group tickets are how tables and sponsorships work — a table might bundle eight individual tickets, and a Bronze Sponsorship might include two seats. The order matters, because the group draws on the individual ticket type you’ve already defined.
Does EventSnap track how many tickets I have left? Yes. You set a quantity when you create each ticket type, and EventSnap tracks it as live inventory. If your venue holds 176 seats, the system counts down as those tickets sell.
Can I accept a check or enter an offline payment? Yes. Go to Event Transactions and use the green add button to enter a manual transaction yourself. This is how you record sponsors who mail a check instead of paying online.
How do I collect meal choices, allergies, and t-shirt sizes? Set them up as user-defined fields in the event admin. Purchasers answer them during the registration step, which comes after checkout, for each guest they’re bringing. If someone never completed registration, you can still capture the answers at the door — pull up the guest during check-in, register them, and enter their responses then.
Can guests still bid if they don’t want to use their phone? Yes. Use manual bid entry in the auction admin to record bids from guests who don’t have a phone or prefer to tell you their bid in person. If someone enters an amount by mistake, bid maintenance lets you go in and change it. The same tools handle live auction results and paddle raise commitments through winning bid entry.
Do the communication tools cost extra? No, they’re included with the product. You get two channels: in-app broadcast messages that pop up for guests who have the auction open on their phone, and text messages that arrive through their regular phone messaging. Which one a given person receives depends on the communication preferences they selected when registering as a bidder.
How do guests pay for the items they win? Bidding closes at the time you set, AuctionSnap emails everyone what they’ve won, and winners open the cart from the menu in the top left of the auction site to pay on their own phone. That’s the goal, because it prevents a long checkout line at the end of the night. Admins can also check people out manually using a check, a card, or a card the bidder stored earlier.
Can I create a seating chart for my gala tables? No. Group Maintenance lets you create tables and golf foursomes, name them, and move people between groups, but it is not a map or a seating chart. It organizes who belongs to which group; it does not lay out the actual room dimensions.
Can I reuse last year’s event setup? Yes. Cloning copies an existing event, including its items and landing page, so an annual gala doesn’t have to be rebuilt from scratch. The trainer also recommends cloning as a safe way to experiment: create the event with its name and date, clone it, test changes in the clone, then disable the clone when you’re done. Finished events can be disabled so your active list stays short.