POSSIBILITY – Using DonorPerfect to Prepare for the Future of Fundraising

Speaker 1 0:15
And we are live. Hello everybody, welcome, welcome, welcome. My name is Sean Patero, and I am a training specialist at Donor Perfect. Welcome to Amanda Trujinsky’s session today. Possibility using Donor Perfect to prepare for future the future of fundraising. This Read More

Speaker 1 0:15
And we are live. Hello everybody, welcome, welcome, welcome. My name is Sean Patero, and I am a training specialist at Donor Perfect. Welcome to Amanda Trujinsky’s session today. Possibility using Donor Perfect to prepare for future the future of fundraising. This session is for advanced leadership. With six years of Donor Perfect training under her belt, Amanda has guided countless nonprofit teams from where do I click to confidently crushing their fundraising goals. She knows that learning new software can feel overwhelming, but she believes anyone can become a power user with the right support, a little encouragement, and a good cup of iced coffee. Okay, maybe, maybe two cups of iced coffee. When she’s not on Zoom, you’ll find her five books deep into a fantasy series, singing and dancing around her living room, or being dramatically ignored by her husky Loki. Some quick housekeeping items: please submit your questions through the Q and A tab, so that we can address them during the session. All sessions are being recorded and will be available on the DonorPerfect website after the conference. Please help me in welcoming Amanda Torchinski. Take it away, Amanda.

Speaker 2 1:29
Thank you, Sean. Thank you. Thank you. Alrighty, and I’m so excited to be here today talking to you guys about, and I’m going to pretend like I know how to use technology for just a second here, let’s go ahead and see if we can get to where I want to be. That is amazing, awesome. So, possibility using your DonorPerfect to prepare for the future of fundraising. So, my goal for you guys is that by the end of the session, you’re going to have a lot more knowledge on how you can use DonorPerfect reports to identify fundraising trends and growth opportunities that matter most to your organization, and how you’re going to be able to connect those insights to the automation and engagement tools that can really help you turn analysis into action. So, we all know fundraising is constantly evolving and changing, and that the strategies that worked for us five years ago may not work for us today, and on top of this, as nonprofit professionals, you’re constantly being bombarded with the next new trendy thing that you should be focusing on. You might attend the webinar where they tell you you need to focus just on monthly giving, or your executive director may be pushing that you need to focus on major donors, and with all that noise, it really might feel like you’re stumbling in the dark, and you’re not sure what trend you should be chasing, because they all seem new, they all seem exciting and shiny, but the reality is that we don’t have the capacity to chase it all or do it all, and it may not just be the right fit for your organization. So, how do you decide what trend you should be focusing on? Well, that’s where we’re going to let your donor perfect data help light your path forward. Your data is what can give you the insight into whether that new trendy thing that everyone is talking about is actually what your organization needs, or whether you need to direct your attention to somewhere different. For example, you might look at your data and realize that you have really low donor retention, which might support that your organization needs to place a bigger emphasis on growing your monthly giving program. Or I could run a report and realize, oh, my average gift is down. Maybe I want to look at building out that mid-level donor segment to help increase those average gifts. Or we might realize we are rock stars at bringing in and acquiring new donors, but we really struggle to keep them engaged and keep them giving, so that might tell us that we need to take a step back and review our first time donor strategy. How we engage them, how can we keep them involved, so that they continue to support and grow as supporters. So, in short, your data can tell you whether you should prioritize a particular strategy or trend, or whether something else needs your attention first. That’s going to be the difference between chasing the trends and making data-informed decisions about what matters most for your organization. So, what my agenda is for today, what we’re looking to accomplish is we’re going to look at how you can use DonorPerfects analytics to spot trends and growth opportunities hiding in your data. How you can then turn that insights into dynamic filters to make sure that you’re reaching the right donor segments, and how you can take those dynamic criteria and connect them to donor perfect automation and engagement tools, so you’re reaching out to the right donors at. At the right time, so let’s start with everyone’s favorite topic, said no one ever. Reports in analytics. So, before you decide where you want to invest your time and resources, you need to know what’s actually working for your organization and where there might be room to grow. DonorPerfect reports can either confirm your hunches about the different strategies or trends that you want to focus on, or it can give you some valuable insight into areas and trends that you should focus on that maybe you weren’t aware of. So, there are so many reports in DonorPerfect, I could never cover all of them, but five reports that we have found to be very helpful for users are going to be your organization dashboard. This is a dashboard you all have access to.

Speaker 2 5:47
You can run it in 30 seconds, and it can really help you know just in this moment, how is your donor retention performing? What is your average gift amount? How many donors do you have giving? It’s going to compare those metrics for this time period to the previous time period, so it’s kind of a quick snapshot in the moment. How is my organization performing? But when you want to drill down and get into more details, when you want to look at larger trends like a three year period, what’s been my retention year to year to year, are my number of donors increasing or decreasing year to year to year. That’s when you want to bring in our favorite report, Comprehensive Donor Revenue Analysis. This report is going to take those same metrics of donor retention, new donors, lapsed donors, and it’s going to allow you to see the trends, the increases, the decreases, the shifts over a three year period. In addition to that report, you also have AFP key donor metrics. This report is going to be very helpful if you want to get insight into what donors are upgrading their giving, what donors are downgrading the giving, who are kind of staying in the same giving amount year to year. Your upgrades are going to be your success stories, the people where your strategy is working, and we want to keep cultivating them and growing that relationship. The downgrades in the AFP key donor metric reports are your early warning signs of donors that may be at risk of lapsing, so we want to engage them. We want to find a way to get them involved and connect with them, so that they can go back into that remain the same, or even better, upgrade status. The gift frequency analysis report is going to help you identify how often your donors are giving and how much they’ve given in a specified date range. Frequent givers are going to be some of your most engaged and strong candidates, especially if we’re looking for monthly giving prospects, or if we’re looking for frequent givers who are giving in larger amounts. Those might be really good prospects for a mid-level two major donor pipelines, donors who are giving less frequently might again be those donors that are at risk of lapsing, or it can be a sign that we have a good, strong acquisition strategy, but we need to focus on how do we secure that second gift. So, these four reports are going to be the reports to maybe help you identify where I want to focus. Do I need to focus on retention? Do I need to focus on laps? Do I need to focus on major or mid-level donors? But knowing the strat or knowing the group that you want to focus on is not enough. I also want to throw out there the report donors’ names, addresses, and phone numbers, which is going to tell you how contactable your donors are. It’s great if we know who we want to reach out to, and it’s even better if you know that I want to do it through email, or I want to use it through direct mail. But if we don’t have emails for our donors, if we don’t have addresses for our donors, or the addresses are incomplete, then we might need to shift our focus from in focusing on engaging these donors to cleaning up our data collection practices, so that we have clean data emails and addresses, so we have a way to actually contact these folks, so that is a whole lot of blah blah blah blah blah. Let’s actually go ahead and take a look at just two of these reports in action, so shifting over to DonorPerfect. I’m going to take a look at the dashboard first, because again, that’s your 32nd health check. How is my organization performing now compared to where I was performing this time last year, so in navigation bar, if we go to the reports icon and select dashboard from the dropdown box, that’s going to be the first option from the top. Dashboard, your dashboard is actually made up of three different screens: organization, my dashboard. Monthly giving dashboard, the one that I want to focus on today, and somehow I lost my mouse.

Speaker 2 10:05
Oh, that’s how you know it’s the end of the day when you’re just losing everything, losing my mind, losing my mouse. So, if we click on organization dashboard, this is where you’re going to be able to actually see those different key performance indicators, what your retention rate is, what your total number of donors is, what your average gift amount is. Just present it to you with just a few simple clicks. So this is how I can maybe start identifying if there’s kind of a problem for me. Is my retention really low? Are my number of donors decreasing? Is my average gift going down? I’m a little bit further down on the screen. You also have growth in giving and donor retention, which can help you see a more month to month breakdown of those metrics. So, again, this is kind of a quick 32nd health check. What’s happening in my system? If I want to look at these metrics, but be able to drill down into who is driving these numbers. If I want to look at a three year comparison of these metrics, that’s when we’re going to run the comprehensive donor revenue analysis report. Try saying that three times fast, it’s quite fun. So, to access that report, we’re going to go back to reports, and from the drop down box, we’re going to select the fourth option from the top report center. Alrighty, so once we’re in the report center, I’m going to have you look to the left-hand side of the screen and select financial reports. In that financial reports folder, you’re going to find the report comprehensive donor revenue analysis. The way that this report runs is, if you wanted to match the numbers on the dashboard, you’re going to have the ending date be today’s date. This is how I’m going to do a three year comparison of this time period to this period last year to the period before. If your fiscal year just ended and you want to do kind of a three year fiscal year report, you’re going to make the ending date your fiscal year, so you can compare this fiscal year to last fiscal year to the prior fiscal year, or you can do it on calendar year. Really, you can run this report on any date range that you want. You just want to keep in mind that it’s going to be three years based off of whatever that end date is. So, let me make it today’s date, so it matches my dashboard, and then what we’re going to do is come down to output options and hit the screen button to run the report. The system is going to ask me, do I want to run the report without a filter? Absolutely, I want to look at all gifts, all donors, all revenue, and this is saying something about my calculated fields, we’re going to just ignore that for now. So, the way that this report is going to break down for us is, we’re going to have three columns of data going along the top: current year, prior year, two years ago. These are your three year periods that we’re looking at. If we look to the left, you’re going to see that you have lots of rows, with each row having a bolded text: active donors, retain donors, new donors, so on and so forth. These are going to be those key performance indicators that we’re going to look at and compare for three years. So, for active donors, number of donors who have given a gift and I can hear the question in the chat. Can I drill into these segments to see the people that are driving? These numbers, absolutely.

Speaker 2 15:03
I can click into any one of these numbers with a hyperlink, and that’s going to take me into the drop down box, or, sorry, into that list of people, and I’m going to be able to see the people that are driving those different numbers, so the whole goal of knowing about these reports and knowing how to run them is to hopefully give you some insight into areas where your organization may need, be may need to improve upon, and knowing what areas you need to improve upon is then going to help you identify what donor segments you want to focus on, which is then going to lead us into our next topic, segmentation and personalization. So, once you’ve identified, all right, so I think I’m back, but if you guys can just give me a confirmation. Oh, thank you, Lisa, for thank welcoming me back. Sorry about that. Let me just see. I’m just gonna stop my screen share really quickly and see if we can just get this party rolling again. Here we go. You know, it’s just not a conference if at least one presentation doesn’t have some tech issues, right?

Speaker 3 16:26
And let’s just see here.

Speaker 2 16:30
Alrighty, so can I just get a quick confirmation? Are you guys seeing a slide that says calculated fields your data your way? Okay, perfect. I think there was just a little bit of a delay there, so that’s perfectly fine. So, let me just take a step back there. So, we talked about how do we run different reports, so that we can really figure out what are the group or where does our organization need to improve, and if we know what we need to improve upon, is it retention, average gifts, total number of donors? When we know what we need to improve upon, that’s going to help us kind of figure out what donor segment or group we really want to focus or relationship with each donor. So one of the first tools that you can use in DonorPerfect, that’s kind of like a little bit of a hidden gem is going to be calculated fields, so just really quickly in the chat, how many people here have ever gone into Excel and asked it to some data or count data or concatenate name information? Perfect. So I’m seeing a couple yeses. So, basically, if you know how in Excel to some data count, find the average, take text-based fields, and combine them together. The great news is you actually know how to basically build a calculated field. All a calculated field is is a formula that lives inside a donor perfect field, so a calculated field can count how many gifts a donor has given in a calendar or fiscal year, so that we can potentially identify monthly giving prospects, people who give quite frequently, but maybe have lower average gift amounts. We can use calculated fields to sum a donor’s total contributions to a particular fund or a particular campaign, so that if we want to identify our top supporters for our capital campaign, we can know who they are, and even better, maybe send them an email or a letter that says, Thank you, Amanda, for your support of $10,000 to our capital campaign, we can also take character fields like first name and last name, or address, city, state, and zip, and we can join them together to have that full text information in a singular field, and the great thing about calculated fields is that they update automatically, so it’s data being updated in real time, giving you the most up-to-date information that you can then incorporate into your selection filters, so you can segment donors by these calculated fields that you build to get even more targeted segments. You can add them to an easy report or an export template, so that you can report on the data or pull it out in Excel, and of course it’s data that you’re going to be able to see on your data entry screen. So, if you are prepping for conversations with donors, these calculations are going to give you some valuable insights that you may not get in DonorPerfect when it’s just the out of the box system. So, unfortunately, I won’t be able to demo how to build a calculative field, but I can actually show you guys at least kind of what they look like, so if I’m going back into DonorPerfect and I’m going to one of my donors, Sandra Davidson, on Sandra Davidson’s profile. On her main data entry table, if I scroll down, I have a section called the donor giving an engagement profile. These are system calculated fields, so these are calculated fields that come with your donor perfect system that allows me to see key metrics like the date that this donor made their first gift. What was the date of their last gift? How much have they given in their lifetime, both in dollars and in number of gifts? But I can also build my own user-defined calculations, so the calculated field number of gifts is a sum of all the gifts that a donor has given over their lifetime, but if I want to look at how many gifts a donor has given this calendar year compared to last calendar year, I can build a calculated field for that. If I want to count how many emails from Constant Contact the donor has opened, so I can see if that is a strategy that works for this person, I can build a calculated field to count the number of emails they opened.

Speaker 2 21:03
I can tell the calculated field to add up the total contributions this donor has made to my building fund over three or four years to be able to see what they gave year over year. So the purpose of these calculated fields is that a great information that I can see on the donor profile to kind of help me know how and why this donor is giving, what is their behavior of giving, but if I want to look at this from a more broad perspective, I can build a custom easy report with my easy report builder. Now I’m not going to demo how to build this, but I do want to emphasize you can build something like this in your system with Easy Report Builder. What I did ahead of this session is in the Report Center, I built myself an Easy Report called Mid Level Donor Report, because that’s kind of where I’ve decided to place my focus, my data is suggesting maybe we want to focus on our mid level to major donor pipeline. So, for this mid level donor report, what I did is over on the far, far, far left, if we look to the left hand side of the screen, I built a selection filter, mid level donor list. If I edit this filter, which you guys cannot see, so let me go ahead and see if I can change that for you guys. Ah, we just, we love a good tech moment. We do, we just, we love a good tech. All right, and I think perfect. So, then, what we’re going to see here is that the way that I built my filter for mid level is I took that calculated field that I built, number of gifts last calendar year. Find me anyone where that field is three or more gifts last calendar year, I took the system calculated field that’s adding up their total gifts from the previous calendar year and saying find anyone who gave three or more gifts last calendar year, and the sum of those gifts is between 1010 $1,000 and I’m specifically looking at individuals in this case, so my calculated field is being incorporated into my filter to help me build a more dynamic list that’s going to update every single time I make changes to the data, go, and I’m super excited to run this report and see what I get, and then what I was able to do is take and build a custom report that is a combination of donor perfect standard fields, donor ID, donor score, email standard fields that’s in everybody’s system, and I’m able to combine them with some of my custom calculated fields, full address, number of gifts this calendar year, number of gifts last calendar year, so I’m really able to take those calculated fields, incorporate them into a filter for segmentation purposes, incorporate them into a report, so that I can get the valuable insight and know which of my major donors I want to touch base with. Next, we’re going to come back to this report in just a second, so let’s just take a look here, because I’ve touched a little bit on with this filter that it’s a dynamic filter, so what I mean is, as donors kind of come in and we add gifts for people if they meet the criteria for this filter, they’re going to get added to my report, but we can actually also build some really cool dynamic filters that are not just based off of like amount of gift or total giving, we can also build some really cool dynamic filters based off of date ranges. Me, so, so often when I work with clients, they’re asking me, I want to find all of my first-time donors that came in in the last seven days, or I want to look for all the last donors, people who haven’t given a gift in the last 12 months, or find me anyone that’s made a gift in the last 365 days, who are my recent donors, and here’s how most of us go about building the filter, because it makes logical sense to us.

Speaker 2 25:25
We go, we build the filter, and we say, donor perfect, look for anyone where their initial gift date is between June 1 of 2026 and June 30 of 2026 and that’s how we build our filter to find first time donors, which is totally valid way to build your filter. You’re going to get a result, you’re going to be able to take action. Now, the only problem with that filter is when you want to pull your new donor list for August, unless you go into that filter and you manually change the date range when you go and try to run that June filter in August. It’s going to be the same result. So something that you can learn how to do in DonorPerfect is build dynamic filters. What this means is that you can use something called relative date functions to say look for all donors where their initial gift date is between the first day of the current month that I’m in and the last day of the current month I’m in, or look for anyone who’s has made a gift in the last 365 days from today’s date, or look for anyone that’s made a gift in the last seven days from whatever day I’m on today. So, the benefit of this is that if you build a dynamic filter with these relative date ranges, you are able to basically build your filter one time, one and done. I now have a new donor this month filter that refreshes every single day, every single month, every single year, every single quarter, just depending on how you built that filter, and the amazing part of that is that once you build that kind of dynamic filter, you can connect it to Constant Contact, and guess what, you just automated your email list to be updated every single day with the most up to date list, without you having to do anything. We love it. You can also connect those filters to any of the reports that you build, so instead of having to go in and change the filter every time you need to run your mid-level donor report. Guess what? If you build a dynamic filter, you just have to remember the name of the report and click run, and you’re going to get your results. So I’m just looking at the time here. It looks like I am almost out of it soon. So what I’m going to do really quickly is to show you guys a few examples of some dynamic filters that I’ve built, so ahead of the session, what I did under settings and filters, so settings in the top right corner, filters. This is your selection filter library. I have my wonderful folder here, Amanda’s Conference, where I’ve built out quite a few of these dynamic filters, so for example, if I want to look for every donor who’s made a gift in the last 365 days, my recent donors, this filter is utilizing the date of gift field. Find anyone whose date of gift was made on or after, so greater than or equal to on or after, and it’s going to look at today minus 365 days. So, for today, this is going to pull everyone who made a gift on or after June 3 of 2025 Tomorrow, it’s going to look at anyone who made a gift on or after june 4 of 2025 and I can do the same thing with membership expiration date. Look at the membership expiration date field. Find me anyone whose membership is going to expire between the first day of next month and the last day of next month, so I can make sure that those folks get an email reminding them that their membership is going to expire, and we would encourage you to renew. So, for these filters, unfortunately, I’m not going to have time to demo how to build them today, but I will encourage you to please go into the knowledge base and look up the article, creating filters using date expressions. Essentially, as long as you can copy and paste the expression from the first column into a filter that you’ve built, you guys can build these kinds of dynamic date range. And queries, and really be able to streamline and automate your donor engagement list. Alrighty, and just give me one second here.

Speaker 2 30:14
I think I’m just getting a little lost in the sauce, but that’s okay. We’re just gonna keep chugging along to talk about our last item here, and our newest feature, donor AI summary. So, imagine for just a second that you ran a report similar to the easy report I showed you, and you’ve identified who your mid-level donors are, you identified who your major donor prospects are, you know who your first-time donors are, and you want to start reaching out to those folks and really start building the relationship with them, but before you do that, you want to go ahead and make sure that you know a little bit about that donor ahead of time, so instead of going to that donor’s record and looking at every single data entry table, clicking into multiple different gifts, multiple different volunteer transactions to try to get some insight. You can instead use the donor AI summary, which is basically going to look at their entire donor profile and give you a summary of their giving patterns, how they’ve been engaged, what they’ve responded to, and you get all of that information and insight in just a few simple sec seconds. Words are escaping me today. So, this can certainly help influence how you choose to engage that donor, how you choose to move forward with building that relationship, what you potentially are going to talk to that donor about, or what you may want to learn more about. So, to show you how easy it is to get one of these summaries, if I were to go to any donor record that’s in DonorPerfect, let’s go to Erica Adams, right to the far right of the main data entry table, we now have a tab called Overview AI Insights, and this is the part where if it doesn’t load, okay, there we go, perfect. So, and it looks like I ran the summary for this person, so I’m going to show you what the fully run summary looks like. What it’s going to do is it’s going to give me a brief summary that tells me what Erica has given over her lifetime. I’m able to see if she has any soft credits. So, do soft credits make up any kind of piece of her giving history? I’m able to see when her largest gift was giving, is she a reoccurring donor? And I love this section at the bottom. What motivates their giving? What are the funds that they tend to designate their gifts to? If we’re doing an email blast out to kind of update people on our building fund efforts, Erica should be on that list, because this is telling me she supports my building fund over 13 times. What are the events and appeals that this person tends to support? Do they have any flags that might just motivate how I have that conversation with this person? So, something that you can pull on a donor by donor basis, and then the top right corner, if you want to get more up-to-date information, you can click the button “Update AI Overview” and that will update this information with all the new data. Alrighty, so once we have those dynamic filters in place, once we’ve built the calculated fields, once we’ve run the donor AI summary to just learn a little bit more about who it is I want to engage with. Now I’m going to want to take advantage of some of the automation and engagement tools that come with DonorPerfect. So, for how we can engage our donors, we come, DonorPerfect comes equipped with quite a few different tools. One of those is going to be donor online forms, or donation forms. DonorPerfect enables you to build custom donation forms, and we encourage you to build unique donation forms for each event and appeal that you’re going to solicit donations for because by building separate donation forms for each event, each appeal, one form for my website, one form for my Giving Tuesday campaign, one form for people to register for my event.

Speaker 2 34:33
If you build separate forms for each one of those components, you can assign unique gift codes, unique solicitation codes, unique general ledger codes, so that when people give through those donation forms, a) they’re super easy for donors to give to, but b) if we code them accurately, you’re going to be able to get that valuable insight in reports in the AI. Summary that tells you why that donor chose to give, that’s the solicitation code, and where they chose that donation to go to, that’s your GL code. Now, if we build those custom donation forms, of course, we can take them, and we can embed that form link behind a donate now button in a Constant Contact email, so Constant Contact. Our first thought is that’s how we’re going to get our form blasted out to our donors. That’s how they’re going to give. Now, the cool thing with Constant Contact to keep in mind is that we can connect those dynamic filters that I talked about to Constant Contact, so you have the most up-to-date list of who it is you want to reach out to, and we would encourage you to not just use it to blast out your donation form, but use that segmented data, use your data in DonorPerfect to segment your constituents, so that you can also update them on the impact that their donations are having. What’s going on in the world relative to your organization’s mission do when those donations come in, depending on your donor perfect package, you may have a tool called Smart Actions, and Smart Actions are really neat because you can set them up so that it can alert you or key stakeholders through email to let you know that a major gift came in, or that someone made their very first gift to the organization, so you’re able to keep yourself and other people informed about these key gifts coming into the system, and if you put an engagement strategy in place, for example, my major donors, I want to follow up with a phone call three days after that gift comes in. The smart action can not only not only alert you that the major gift came in, but it can also create the contact transaction and assign it to the staff member that’s going to be responsible for following up with that task. So it really is basically turning donor perfect into its own administrative user, and then the last thing that I’m going to talk about today on this slide is going to be our scheduled reports, so you do have the ability to take any easy report and some of the standard reports in financial listing and other, and you’re able to schedule them to be delivered to the inbox of yourself or key stakeholders on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, which is amazing. Because essentially, if you know how to build a dynamic filter, you know how to build an easy report, and you know how to schedule it, you can basically automate quite a bit of your reporting workflow, so you can go on vacation and make sure that your accounting folks or your executive director is getting the information that they need. So, just to review and wrap up kind of what we were focusing on for today, always start with your data. Start with your data. Run different reports to kind of figure out where your organization should be focusing on. Don’t make assumptions. Don’t trust something just because it’s the trendy thing you’re being told to focus on. Look at your data, let that guide your path forward. Let that tell you what your strategy should be.

Speaker 2 38:21
Once you figured out where you want to go and who it is you want to touch base with, then you can start bringing in some of the dynamic tools, like calculated fields, dynamic filters, to help you create donor segments that can update automatically, so you always know who you need to contact next, and those dynamic filters can be linked to different automation and engagement tools to help streamline your donor engagement process and help keep yourself and other key stakeholders informed about how successful the strategy is. So, with that said, I think if I say Sean Patero, Sean Patero, Sean Patero, three times, it’ll be like Beetlejuice, and there he goes, he magically appears. So I can try to address some of the questions coming in.

Speaker 1 39:09
I, if, if you are still, if you could close your screen share for a second, we have a inception type thing going on. Yeah, and no, no. Thank you. That was great. I’m sorry to interrupt you. I was just in the middle of writing a strongly worded email to our internet service provider about connection issues, totally unrelated. Yeah, and if I didn’t have headphones on when you magicked me in, I was going to spin around in my seat, and it would have been really funny, but we had some questions from the audience. If you could, for anybody that doesn’t know, what is a soft credit exactly?

Speaker 2 39:49
Oh, that’s a wonderful question. So, donor advised funds are becoming more and more a popular way that donors are choosing to make donations through, so things like. Benevity Vanguard, for example, so when we get donations through Benevity through Vanguard, we always recommend, because the donation is technically coming from that entity or organization, that you put the gift underneath that organization’s profile. Now, with that said, we always want to make sure, if possible, that we can credit that that donation came in because Sean Patero directed Benevity to make a donation to Coral Acres, so what I can do is I can soft credit that Benevity donation to Sean Patero to show that he’s the one that directed that donation to come to our organization, and those soft credits can then be incorporated into calculated fields or into those giving totals, so I can make sure that that donation that came through the donor advised fund is being represented in Sean’s giving history as a donor, but I’m not double counting that soft credit when I run a financial report, because yes, we want to engage our donors and build a relationship, but we also want to make sure our accountants are happy and that our numbers are reconciling and matching.

Speaker 1 41:08
Do you want to keep the accountants happy? I agree.

Speaker 2 41:10
Yes.

Speaker 1 41:13
And a follow-up question, because you brought up calculated fields, there’s some questions about the comprehensive donor revenue analysis, which Christine loves, but does it include soft credits? That comprehensive donor revenue analysis,

Speaker 2 41:28
so that report does not include soft credits. That is only going to look at donations. Now, Sean, please let me know, is there a way that you can incorporate soft credits, because I’m not aware of such a

Speaker 1 41:39
not, not in the comprehensive donor revenue analysis, double checked with the brain trust, that is not that is not a thing, and Christy even had a clarifying point of what if I change the parameters to include soft credits and calculated fields, that’s still that’s still no base. Yeah,

Speaker 2 41:57
so that will just the system calculated fields, lifetime giving calendar, you’re giving first gift, last gift, that will make sure that the soft credit is represented in those, so those are really great when we’re building more donor-focused reports, but still not going to be incorporated in a comprehensive donor revenue analysis, because that’s a financial report, so those were billed more so to really look at gifts specifically.

Speaker 1 42:22
Got it. Love it. Okay. All right. Thank you. And don’t have any more time for any more questions. Thank you, everybody, for attending and being involved. Thank you for the patience there with our little internet hiccup there. Can’t control the internet, can’t control the internet, we try, we try, we’re only human. Some quick housekeeping items, or well, now that we’re done. Actually, thank you for joining Amanda’s session. We hope you had a fantastic conference experience, and some great takeaways. Please join us in closing remarks in a recap of 2026 DonorPerfect Conference, hosted by Clay Buck, starting very soon. You don’t want to miss it. Take care, everybody.

Unknown Speaker 43:03
Bye.