Sponsorships often come with perks for those willing to help support your upcoming event – and one of the most common perks is a set of free, complimentary tickets for your sponsor’s guests.

Wondering just how to add and track those courtesy tickets in your Essential Event, to make sure they’re included in your final guest counts? Want to make sure those complimentary tickets aren’t included in your fundraising totals? Be sure to follow the steps below!

Please be sure that before you look to add a sponsor’s complimentary tickets, that you’ve already added the corresponding sponsorship (and the sponsor) to your Essential Event. If you need a quick refresher on that process, check out our related guide here.

In your Fundraising Pages account, select the Essential Event you’re looking to add the complimentary tickets to.

Then, select the “Tickets and Sponsorships” tab, and scroll down to the section labeled “Promo Code.”

Select the option to “Add Promo Code,” and fill out the fields in the pop-up window to create a new promo code – this will serve as the way to “zero out” the cost of your sponsor’s complimentary tickets.

You should title the promo code something that’s easy to remember – like “SPONSORZERO” or “COURTESY100”.

You’ll also want to ensure that the Discount Amount Per Ticket should be set to the “percentage” option, and that the percentage field should be set to 100%.

You can also choose to set the availability of the promo code (in terms of how long the code can be used for), as well as what specific ticket types the promo code can be applied to.

Once you’re satisfied with the promo code you’ve created, click “Create Promo Code.” You should now see it listed on your Essential Events page, under the "Tickets and Sponsorships” tab.

Not familiar with how to add an offline ticket purchase in your Fundraising Pages account? Check out this guide here to learn more about how that feature works – and syncs to Donor Management.

Once you’ve created your “courtesy ticket” promo code, you’ll next want to select the “Guests” tab on your Essential Event. Then, select the option to “Add Ticket Purchase”.

A pop-up window should appear; you will want to enter the name of the sponsor’s guest into the “Donor” field – not the sponsor themselves.

Fill out all the corresponding required fields as you would any offline ticket, including:

For the “Payment Type” field, you’ll want to select “Other,” to help identify those courtesy tickets more clearly in your reporting.

For the “Payment Description” field, you might want to add a note indicating that these tickets are complimentary, and the “donor” is the guest of one of your sponsors.

Finally, you’ll want to pay special attention to the “Promo Code” field. This is where you should be able to select the courtesy ticket promo code you created in the first step to this offline ticket.

Once you’ve filled out all these fields, you can click “Save & Exit” in the top right-hand corner.

You should now be able to see this complimentary ticket listed both on the Essential Event itself (under the “Guests” tab), and on the guests’ donor profile.

If one of your sponsor’s guests isn’t already a contact within your Donor Management System, you will need to add that guest during the second step of this process (creating the offline ticket). There is an option under where you’d enter the donor’s name to add a “guest donor.”

This will then add the sponsor’s guest as a contact in both Fundraising Pages and Donor Management, so you can easily track and communicate with them in the future.

That’s perfectly okay! If you don’t know the names of your sponsors’ guests, you can list the sponsor as the “donor” when creating the offline ticket purchase (in step 2).

Then, once you confirm the sponsor’s guests, you can either “reassign” the ticket to the correct guest, or ask for assistance from Bonterra’s Solution Team to have that ticket properly reassigned.

You should be able to pull a report of those complimentary guests through the same reporting channels you would use for any guest list! The offline tickets will be synced to your Donor Management system automatically.

This means that you can filter specifically for those guests by creating a report under the “Giving” tab, and searching for tickets that used the promo code that you created in step 1.