Events handles ticketing and registration for anything you host — a gala, a tournament, a talk. This walkthrough builds an event from the settings page through to what a donor sees at checkout, including sponsorships, add-ons, and the member benefits that make each event's pricing your own.
What events covers
Customizing the event form for how you show up to your donors, setting and updating ticket types, extending member benefits, gating ticket sales behind a membership entitlement, early bird pricing, sponsorships, add-ons, and live check-in during the event itself.
Creating an event and naming it
Where to find it. From your dashboard, open Events. Existing events are listed here, and this is where you create a new one.
A new event opens on its settings page. Start with the event name — make it descriptive, because it is public facing.
Venue, fundraising goal, and total capacity
Set the venue name and address, and optionally a fundraising goal. The fundraising goal is not shown to donors; the venue name and address are.
Total capacity is the overall limit for the event. Leave it blank and capacity is governed only by whatever constraints you set at the ticket type level.
Setting both works as a pair of ceilings. With three ticket types capped at 100 tickets each and a total capacity of 200: no single ticket type can sell more than 100, and all three combined cannot exceed 200.
The waitlist
People can join a waitlist for ticket sales or sponsorships. As with total capacity, you can set a waitlist capacity cap — the maximum number of registrations you will accept onto the list.
Draft and published status
New events start in draft. You cannot see or review the event page until the event is published, and publishing makes it active and available immediately. Keep the event in draft until you are ready to put it in front of your donor base.
Event series and the box office
An event series is a page you embed on your website showing every event attached to it — the box office. Publishing an event also adds it to its series, so it appears in the box office automatically.
You can run several series and choose which one a given event belongs to.
Payment account and external ticketing
Choose which payment account this event's revenue goes into. Payment accounts determine where funds are actually distributed for your 501 organization — see Payment accounts.
For events you host but do not ticket yourself, enter an external registration URL. The event still appears in your box office or embedded on your site, with a link out to the external site for registration.
When tickets go on sale
The tickets on sale date and time is when tickets become available to the general public. Early access for members is set separately, under member benefits.
If the page is published but tickets are not yet on sale, visitors see the event and its details but no tickets until that date has passed.
Event dates and the registration window
Set a start and end date and time for the event; multi-day events are supported.
The registration window lets registration run independently of the event date. This is what makes member early access work — if tickets go on public sale on 1 September but you want members buying before that, the registration window has to be broad enough to accommodate the earliest membership entitlement you have configured.
When registration closes, and walk-ups
Registration closes is the last date you will accept ticket sales, after which PineconeAI closes sales automatically. Closing roughly one day before the end of your event is recommended.
If you want to take walk-ups, change that date just before the event starts to reopen registrations.
Event content, card summary, and imagery
The event content fields support rich text formatting — columns, line breaks, bulleted and numbered lists.
- Card summary — a short snippet shown to prospective donors on the box office page.
- Additional information — appears below the event detail, and below the event image if you have uploaded one.
- Header logo — the smaller logo, usually your organizational logo, displayed on the event page.
- Event image — the image specific to this event. As elsewhere, use a hosted URL or upload directly.
Box office versus embedding a single event
If you use an event series you do not need to embed individual events — the box office does it for you. Donors move from the event list into an event, review it, buy tickets, then navigate back and see everything else in that series.
Embed a single event with its iframe snippet when you want a dedicated page for that one event, carrying content the box office would not.
The overview tab
The overview shows every revenue card for the event: the number of tickets, sponsorships and add-ons sold, total revenue raised, the value of any comped tickets, and — if you are using live check-in — the check-in rate.
Ticket types, pricing, and early bird
The tickets tab is where you set capacity, price, and early bird pricing for each ticket type.
Early bird pricing takes a price and an end date. It is separate from any membership entitlement price, which is configured under member benefits.
Ticket types can be reordered to control how they appear on the page, and deleted. A ticket type with sold items attached may not be deletable until the revenue reconciliation for those tickets has been moved; types with no sales can be deleted freely.
Manual registrations
Manual registration is for tickets bought offline. Online sales already run through PineconeAI's billing portal and need no manual step.
Enter the first and last name, the email address, the ticket type, the number of tickets, and the payment method — cash, check, other, or comp. A comped ticket carries no charge and does not increase the event's ticket revenue.
You can email the attendee a confirmation of the manual registration.
Additional guest names can be left blank, which is usual for a manual registration — they show as a guest of the purchaser. The donor can fill them in later through the customer portal, or you can edit them once you have the details.
Attendees, check-in, and cancelling a registration
The attendees tab lists everyone registered, with their name and email address, their ticket type, any restrictions the ticket holder has on attending, and who purchased that ticket. If you are using PineconeAI for live check-in, it also shows who has checked in.
Cancelling a registration releases that ticket back into the ticketing pool. Refunds are handled separately from cancelling a registration — so you can hold a no-refunds policy for an event and still let someone release a ticket they cannot use.
Attendee details can be edited at any time and update in real time, so a placeholder guest can become a real name once you know it.
Sponsorships and benefit fulfillment
Sponsorships carry benefits — ticket types or add-ons — and can be sold regardless of when general ticketing opens.
Each level takes a name, a price, a quantity available or unlimited, the tickets included, and a benefit description that is shown on the events page. Levels can be reordered.
For sold sponsorships you can track fulfillment of each benefit: whether a sponsor's name and logo have appeared on the website or on the banner at the event, marked as not started, in process, or fully delivered. Most sponsorships will not need this, but it is there.
Sponsorships can also be recorded manually as cash, check, other, or comped, with a receipt sent to the sponsor.
Add-ons, per attendee or per purchase
Add-ons are extras attached to an event — valet parking, or a premium wine selection at a gala.
The per attendee setting is the one that matters. Turn it on and each attendee in a party can choose the add-on individually, so one guest takes the premium wine and another does not. Turn it off and the add-on applies to the entire ticket purchase for that party and is billed once.
Member benefits: early access and discount rules
Member benefits are set per membership tier, per event. The tiers themselves come from Memberships.
Early ticket access gives a tier a date and time ahead of public sale.
Rules apply a discount to a specific ticket type, with a maximum quantity at that price. A tier might get 50% off player tickets limited to two; beyond that limit the member pays full price. Add further rules to the same tier — for example a fixed $10 off valet parking, limited to one.
Setting early access and benefit rules per tier, per event, is what lets each event be priced on its own terms for your members and donors.
Donations, donors, and notes
- Donations — donations added on to an event ticket purchase.
- Donors — donor gifts directly related to this event.
- Notes — internal notes about the event, and where notes from a donor appear.
What your donors see
The live event page leads with your header logo and the content image, then the venue name and location, the event dates and times, and the registration window. Below that sit the full event details, an email address field, and then sponsorships and add-ons.
Where tickets are not yet on public sale, the page says so and notes that members may be able to book early.
Member pricing and sponsorship tickets at checkout
A donor with an active membership entitlement enters their email address and, once verified, sees tickets unlocked with the original price struck through and the member price applied.
The quantity limit on the rule is enforced live: take two tickets at the member price and a third jumps back to full price. Any add-on benefit is applied at the same time.
Sponsorships that include tickets behave the same way. Add a gold sponsorship that includes two player tickets and those two are covered — at checkout the ticket lines appear but are not charged, because the sponsorship level includes them.
The box office and event series — how events are presented across your website — are covered in Box office & event series.
