How to Build a Donor Profile Before Your Next Fundraising Gala

You Know Your Big Donors. Do You Know Everyone Else?

Tony Rissley has spent two decades running silent auctions from the back of the room, watching guests up close in real time, and he's noticed a consistent blind spot. "What I see missing is the charities and the organizations themselves knowing exactly who is every person in that room, every person at that table — why are they there? Are they there for a free dinner? Are they there to give? Do they have a story?" Nonprofits typically know their headline donors cold. What they don't know, table by table, is who else is sitting there, why that guest was invited, and what their actual giving capacity might be. "We know who the big donors are," Rissley said, "but who exactly is at that table? That's kind of been my mission — how do we figure that out?"

His answer isn't a better check-in process or a sharper seating chart. It's a pre-event survey campaign built to extract real information from guests before they ever walk through the door — while giving them a reason to actually respond.

Start the Moment You Sell the Ticket

Asked how far in advance this data collection should begin, Rissley didn't hedge. "When we're starting to sell tickets, I mean, every ticket that you sell, you need to start understanding who that person is and what they're bringing to the room." His model is a five-to-seven-email drip campaign that starts as soon as ticket sales open and runs through the weeks leading up to the event — not a single "need to know" email sent the week before, which is the default most organizations settle for.

Each email in the sequence does two jobs at once: it tells a piece of the mission's story, and it asks one simple, low-friction question. "Which of these live auction items would you love to bid on?" is a typical opener. Later emails go further, asking guests to self-select a giving range for the paddle raise, phrased carefully so it never feels like an obligation. "I'm not able to give, but I'm going to cheer as loud as possible" is offered as a built-in out. "It's not an obligation," Rissley said. "It's all in the wording." The payoff, when it works, is a rough giving-capacity estimate for individual guests weeks before the event — not a guess made from the stage in the moment.

Mini takeaway: A survey question that includes a graceful "I can't give tonight, but I'm cheering you on" option gets more honest responses than one that doesn't.

Make the Survey Worth Answering

Rissley borrowed the mechanic from a company in the association-conference world called Prop Fuel, which runs simple one-question surveys tied to an incentive — in his case, a chance to win a travel package. "People also love a chance to win something for participating," he said. "Giving them a reason to participate" is the difference between an email that gets ignored and one that gets answered. The incentive doesn't have to break the budget, either. A leftover live auction item that didn't sell, a bottle of wine, a donated dinner at a local restaurant — anything with perceived value can be repurposed as an entry prize rather than sitting unused. "I think you're going to make more money when you know who exactly is in the room," Rissley said. "Not an overall — oh, this is who is here. No — when you know who is in each individual seat and what their possibilities are."

The same incentive structure works just as well after the event as before it. Rissley's team runs a year-end $500 gift card drawing tied to a post-event survey, purely for participation. "It's your marketing dollars — use it wisely, and it's great information that you're getting."

Every Email Is Also a Story, Not Just a Question

The survey campaign isn't only a data-collection tool — it doubles as ongoing mission education for guests who may not fully understand why they were invited in the first place. "Some of the people in the room, again, given tickets, sponsorship — they don't know why they're there or sometimes what the cause is. I've seen that in the rooms. They're just there for a party." Every email in the sequence reinforces the story: what the funds support, what the live auction and paddle raise are actually funding, and why the night matters. "It's just repetition, repetition," Rissley said. By the time a guest arrives at the gala, they've already been told — multiple times, in different framings — exactly what kind of night this is and why their participation matters.

The campaign also creates a natural, low-pressure way to spotlight event sponsors well before the night itself. "These events run on sponsorships," Rissley said. Naming the live auction's presenting sponsor or the wine pull's underwriter inside a pre-event email gives that sponsor visibility over several touchpoints instead of one mention from the stage — more value delivered for the same sponsorship dollar.

The Permission Moment

Rissley's sharpest concept from the conversation is what he calls the permission moment — the instant a room decides, collectively, that it's safe to start giving. He compares it to a dance floor. "Nobody wants to be the first person to get on the dance floor. But as soon as three people get on the dance floor, social proof is telling me that it's okay to dance." The same dynamic plays out at the top of a paddle raise: the first raised paddle gives everyone else in the room permission to follow. "Once that first person raises their paddle, they are giving permission to everybody else in the room that it is safe. This is the place to — we're proving this together."

Rissley's insight is that this permission moment doesn't have to start on stage. It can start weeks earlier, inside the survey emails themselves. "Fifteen people were bidding on Tuscany last year — are you one of them this year?" is the kind of line he'd use to establish social proof before the event even begins, so that by the time the auctioneer opens the paddle raise, part of the room has already mentally opted in.

Mini takeaway: The first raised paddle gives the room permission to give. You can manufacture that same social proof in email, weeks before anyone sets foot in the ballroom.

When You Can't Get Guest Information From Sponsors

The hardest version of this problem shows up with sponsor and table-host guests, where organizations often have no direct contact information for who's actually going to be sitting at that table. Rissley's fix skips digital channels entirely for this specific ask. "Text, email — those are all easy outs for people to ignore," he said. "Go back to the old phone call... stress the importance of what we're trying to do." His script: thank the sponsor for their support, ask them to be an advocate at their own table, and explain plainly why the guest information matters. "Be honest with them. Be transparent, and share with them how — why it's so important for them to collect it. It's going to be a little bit more work, yes, but I think the payoff and the value of putting that work in is going to pay off tenfold once you have all that data."

Making that ask easier for the sponsor also helps. Giving a table host ready-made copy to forward to their own guests — "here's what we're asking for and here's the link" — removes friction and increases the odds the information actually gets collected before the event, rather than discovered awkwardly at check-in.

Ask Again After the Event

The same survey mechanics that work before the gala apply just as well afterward, and Rissley argues nonprofits should stop treating a feedback request as an imposition. Simple post-event questions — did the cocktail hour run long enough, what would you improve, did you enjoy the live auction — feed directly into next year's planning. Paired with a prize incentive, response rates go up considerably. "I think gone are the days where we thought it was, oh, we're imposing by asking questions," Rissley said in the conversation. Donors and attendees generally want the chance to weigh in — the barrier is usually that nobody made it easy or worthwhile for them to do so.

The larger payoff compounds year over year. Every survey response — pre-event or post-event — adds another data point to a donor's profile: what they bid on, what range they indicated for giving, what they said they'd improve. None of it requires expensive new software. It requires treating every email touchpoint as an opportunity to learn something specific about the person on the other end, rather than sending the same generic "see you there" blast to the entire list. Build that profile methodically enough, and by the time the auctioneer opens the night, the room isn't a mystery anymore — it's a plan.

The Data Compounds — Even for Guests Who Never Respond

Not every guest will answer a pre-event survey, and Rissley doesn't treat that as a failure of the system. A campaign that gets even a fraction of the room to self-report a giving range, an item preference, or an honest "I can't give this year but I'll be cheering" still hands an organization more usable information than it had the year before — because most nonprofits currently have none of it. The mobile bidding platforms already used for silent and live auctions add another layer for free: who bid, on what, and at what time of night. Compared year over year, that data starts to reveal patterns — which auction categories consistently draw the most engagement, which donor segments respond to which kind of ask, and when in the evening giving actually peaks. "We can take that year-over-year and compare that data and just fine-tune and curate the auction with that," Rissley said.

None of this replaces the instinct and relationship-building that good development staff and board members already bring to a gala. It sharpens it. A board member walking up to a table still needs to know who they're talking to and why that person matters to the mission — the survey data just means that conversation starts from something more specific than a guess. Over several years of running this kind of campaign, the profile an organization builds on its donor base becomes an asset in its own right, one that keeps paying off long after the specific auction items and the specific gala theme are forgotten.

Insights in this article are drawn from the Hey Nonprofits! LIVE episode “Who's in the Room?: Building Your Donor Profile & Pre-Event Strategy”, featuring Expo Auctions founder and CEO Tony Rissley.