Session Notes: Reporting

For this session, we discussed updates we’ve released for reporting and some reporting best practices. We also talked through future enhancements we are considering for reporting and badging.

Generally, we like to provide some context on future enhancements but we will also create and push cues to DonorDock when we publish new updates to outline the new functionality.

Be sure to view those as they are quick and really helpful to you as a user. We did this for the reporting updates, which we hope you were able to review when you logged in. If you missed it, we covered all of that in this session.

New Report Updates - Aggregate Gift Totals

Updates to Report Displays

Depending on your list page setting you may need to scroll within your reports to see all results. The new functionality now renders the report view and the scrolling happens in the report itself, allowing for the headers to move with the reports

Note: We found one possible issue you could potentially run into. If you have a large amount of scaling turned up in your browser(s), you may see a big congested view and the scroll bar within the report may not be visible because of this.

Grouping

• Grouping is not new but may be functionality you aren’t familiar with.
  Note: When exporting to excel the grouping carries through

• Within a repot, simply drag a column up to header and it shows you the aggregates of grouping.

• In our example, we grouped by type. With the groupings we were able to see gift totals by the group type.

• Gift Report

• There is a row for each transaction so a donor may show up multiple times if they had multiple transactions within the report’s specified time frame.
• There is a count that shows distinct donors at the bottom of the report, meaning it represents the total number of donors for all transactions in that report.

Aggregates work on all types of reporting - Contact, Gift and Activity. If you want to export your report, those aggregated totals and groupings will also transfer into the report as well!

Report Filters - What They Mean and How to Use them

Generally speaking for report filters, you will always include properties to pull back data in your system as it relates to:

1. Donor Status (Active/Archived)
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2. Donor(s) Stage in the donor lifecycle (prospect, donor or lapsed), and
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3. Types of donor(s) (Individual, organization or household) you want to report on
   a. When you are filtering across these multiple properties, you are asking for the system to give you all contacts that:
       i. Have a particular Status or all statuses, AND
        ii. Are in a particular Stage or all stages in the donor life cycled, AND
      iii. Are a particular Type of contact or all contact types

Within each property there are filters with an OR type of property. If you were to add badges to the filters, within the badge filter field, you are asking the system to return all of the above properties you chose (Status AND Stage AND Type) AND the badge you choose plus all other Badges you want to filter on:

1. All properties above, AND
2. The first Badge filter, OR
3. The second badge filter, OR
4. The third badge filter, etc….

Same rules/intent will go for Excluding Badges, Including Marketing Lists or Excluding Marketing Lists and Gift Filters.

Some other clarifying things around Gift filters:

• First Gift - of the contacts pulled in your report this is a filter that tells the system to include all properties required above AND any contacts that have given a First Gift within the specified time frame set on this filter
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• Second Gift - of the contacts pulled in your report this is a filter that tells the system to include all properties required above AND any contacts that have given a Second Gift within the specified time frame set on this filter
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• Last Gift Date - of the contacts pulled in your report this is a filter that tells the system to include all properties required above AND any contacts whose Last Gift was given within the specified time frame set on this filter
  a. Note: If you are looking for gifts last year or total gifts within a custom time frame, the Giving Summary Report is a great resource that can be filtered by specific date ranges and is inclusive of any gift (not constrained by First, Second or Last Gift) transactions of contacts within the specified time frame.

Some Things in the Works

Data is so powerful in that it can provide trends, allow you to analyze, or build status reports of all kinds and basically let you deduce what you need with the right sorting, filtering, manipulating, etc.

With that said, it can also be very hard to simplify and truly render exactly what it is you are looking for.

At DonorDock, we did due diligence in making reporting tasks easier, however, we strive to continually improve this so it’s easier for everyone.

Because of that, we are adding to our roadmap. One thing worthy to note that we will work on in the future is creating functionality of a prescriptive guide to reporting:

1. Asking what you are looking for
2. Providing options to choose from, and
3. Returning results to make it more intuitive for you

Other Future Updates in our Sights

We’ve realized we could improve the segmentation and badging and are considering further enhancements as follows:

1. Make Badges as Contact Lists
   a. Include the ability to click on a badge and see a list of contacts that have that badge wherever it’s represented
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2. Update Managing Badges Globally
   a. Add sub menu to contacts to include contact lists
   b. Contact lists would show a specific area to manage badges and marketing lists
   c. Ability to go to specific contact records from the lists
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3. Allow for More Customization/Automation of Badges
   a. Ability to edit color of badge visually
   b. Automated badges that will be pre-build you can choose from
       i. A couple ideas/examples could be:
             1. When you track a volunteers first hours, will Badge a donor as a Volunteer
             2. Badge a contact with Average Gift Amount
   c. Ability to use the emails for both Marketing Lists and Badges

We had a great Q&A discussion where your feedback helped provide direction and clarity for what we're working on in the coming weeks, so thank you! 

Feel free to bookmark our events page, and join us every other Tuesday at 10:00 am CST for our future User Success Calls and Q&A sessions.

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