Fundraising in Noctern — getting started

Noctern does fundraising alongside ticketing, against the same people. A patron who buys tickets and a patron who gives you $500 are the same record, so giving history, ticket history, and household sit together — and a donation never has to be re-keyed into a separate system.

This page is the map. Everything below links to the topic that covers it in full.

The five words to know

• Gift (or donation) — money given with nothing sold in return. Every gift belongs to one patron and one fund.
• Fund — the named account a gift is designated to, like "Annual Fund" or "Education & Access". Every venue starts with one default fund that catches undesignated gifts.
• Appeal — the specific ask that brought a gift in: a spring letter, a gala, a giving day. Optional, and reported separately from the fund.
• Pledge — a promise to give a total amount over time. The pledge isn't a gift; each installment is.
• Sustainer — a donor giving automatically on a recurring card schedule.

Before you start

• Venue Admin reaches the Fundraising page. Managing funds and appeals and generating year-end statements need no extra permission. The Donor data permission is what gates recording gifts, the Gifts ledger, pledges, the sustainer list, and the acknowledgment queue; the Exports permission gates the development reports; and the Venue settings permission gates saving your nonprofit settings.
• The venue owner holds every permission. Staff you grant admin access to hold only the ones you tick on the Team page, so check Donor data for anyone who will handle gifts — see Venue team and permissions.
• Box-office staff can't open the Fundraising pages at all. They can still add a donation to a ticket sale at the box office (step 4 below).
• Fundraising has to be switched on for your venue. If the Fundraising card on the venue hub is greyed out as "Nonprofit features not enabled," Noctern support turns that on for you — it isn't a setting you can reach.

Set it up in this order

Each step works on its own, so you can stop after step 4 and still be taking and recording gifts.

1. 1

   Nonprofit settings. On AdminVenuesEdit (the Edit details link on the venue hub), open the Nonprofit Settings card and enter your 501(c)(3) Legal Name, your Donation Receipt Statement, and your Donation Presets ($). These decide the name and wording donors see on receipts and statements, and the amounts offered when they give. → Nonprofit settings

2. 2

   Funds and appeals. Go to AdminVenuesFundraising and name the funds you solicit for, marking any donor-restricted ones Restricted. Add an appeal for each campaign you want to report on separately. Do this early: every later step asks which fund a gift belongs to. → Funds and appeals

3. 3

   Take gifts online. The same page has your public donate page link and a QR for lobby signage. Put the link on your website's Donate button; copy an appeal's donate link into the letter or email that is that appeal, and gifts arriving through it are attributed to it automatically. → Making a donation is what your donors see.

4. 4

   Take gifts with a ticket sale. When your venue has donation presets saved, the box office and paid online ticket checkout show a donation card with a No thanks button, your preset amounts, and a Custom $ box. At the box office the card is titled Add a donation; online it reads "Support" followed by your legal name when one is set, and Add a donation otherwise. Those gifts land in the default fund with no appeal, and show up in the Gifts ledger like any other.

5. 5

   Record gifts that arrive off-platform. Checks, cash, and in-kind gifts are entered by hand with Record a gift, including the fund, the appeal, soft credits, and matching-gift details. → Recording a manual gift, Soft credits and matching gifts, and Editing or voiding a gift when one needs correcting.

6. 6

   Pledges and sustainers. Record a multi-installment promise as a pledge and track it as installments arrive; let donors give on a recurring schedule as sustainers. → Pledges, Recurring donors (sustainers), and Donors managing their own sustainer gift.

7. 7

   Acknowledgments. Only a gift made on your public donate page is receipted by email automatically (for a sustainer, only the first installment is). Every other gift — a check or cash gift you record, a donation added to a ticket order, a sustainer's later installments — waits in the acknowledgment queue until someone sends it. → Gift acknowledgments

8. 8

   Year-end statements. Once a year, generate the per-donor PDF summarizing everything they gave in the tax year, then batch-email or download them. → Year-end giving statements

9. 9

   Reports. Gift totals, donor counts, pledge aging, and who gave last year but not this year. → Fundraising reports and the donor retention report.

Where the donor record lives

Fundraising reads and writes the patron CRM, so it's worth knowing those pages too:

• The patron record — how patrons are created and what they hold.
• A patron's Giving tab — one donor's gifts, pledges, and lifetime totals.
• Households — patrons who give together, with their combined giving totals. Year-end statements are still generated one per patron.
• Merging duplicate patrons — before a statement run, not after.
• Importing patron data — bringing giving history over from a previous system.
• The activity log — who changed what, when.

Two adjacent topics people look for here: refunding a ticket as a donation, and gift certificates as a donor benefit.

Watch out