9. Reporting 101

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to our Reporting 101 webinar. This webinar is part of our foundation series, and it’s designed to help you learn the fundamental components of DonorPerfect reporting elements. We’re going to be reviewing the Report Center for easy to use Read More

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to our Reporting 101 webinar. This webinar is part of our foundation series, and it’s designed to help you learn the fundamental components of DonorPerfect reporting elements. We’re going to be reviewing the Report Center for easy to use reports to get you started with reporting on your data and walking through how to use the sidebar filter to pull a list of constituents or gifts that you’re looking for.
My name is Amanda Tadrzynski, and I have the absolute honor of getting to be your guys trainer today for our webinar in terms of what we’re going to be covering today or what we’re hoping you guys will walk away with. We’re going to be walking through three parts that are needed for successful reporting. We’re going to walk through how to use the sidebar filter as a way to pull a very specific list of constituents or gifts, and we’re going to be taking a look at four Easy To Use Reports that are included in everybody’s database.

So what are the three parts that are needed for a successful report? Well, there’s three questions that we want to ask ourselves.

In any CRM. There’s a recommended process for getting your desired outcome. Specifically, we’re going to break those out into three concepts. The first being choosing who or which records you want to include in your outcome. So this could be that I want to pull a list of all of my first time donors. I want to pull a list of all of my foundations. I would like to see a list of all of the gifts that have come in in the last week. So we’re essentially defining the specific group of constituents or gifts that we want to pull a list about. Then we want to ask ourselves the question, well, what data? What data is the information we want to see in the outcome of the selected records? So for a list of first time donors, you may want to see their name, email address, and the details about their first gift for foundations that have given a gift. You might want to see the name of the organization and the main contact for the list of donations that came in last week. You might want to see the gift amount, the date of gift, what is the fundraising appeal that the donor gave to, and where did the donor designate their gift to? So we essentially combine the who or which records I want to pull a list about and the what data, what information I want to know about them, and that helps you pick the correct DonorPerfect report that’s going to give you the data you’re interested in seeing, and then we use the filters to help the system know which records to show in that report. And some examples of the types of reports that you can pull with DonorPerfect are reports that only are focused on your people, your donors, your constituents. Reports that let you see the details about your donors and some high level information about their giving history. We can look at reports that includes primarily details about the donations, but also tells us the name of the donor. Or we can look at reports where our focus is more on the total dollars received. So let’s talk about each one of these parts in a bit more detail before we see how this works. So generally, when we work one on one with clients, and we ask them about reporting, they actually always come with their filter. So if I ask someone, well, what reports do you want to pull? They might say, I want to pull a list of my monthly donors. I want to see a list of my first time donors. I want to see all of the gifts that I received last week, or a list of all of the contributions to my unrestricted fund. So defining who you want to pull a list about, or which gifts you want to pull a list on, is really addressing the question of your filter. You’re defining essentially the specific group of constituents or the specific group of gifts that you want to pull a report about now, depending on how you’re planning on using that list will help you pick the correct type of filter to build. DonorPerfect actually has three different filtering options. Is selection filters, sidebar filters and compound filters. Selection filters can be used across any report and are also used when you’re using our other tools, like creating segmented lists for Constant Contact or creating a filter for a smart action to only trigger under specific circumstances, or creating a filter to use our mail merge tool for your direct mail appeal sidebar. Filters are going to be found within select Reports and DonorPerfect, and they’re going to be the type of report filter that we’re going to be focusing on today, where you can customize a set list of fields and very quickly apply quick and simple filters to get quick reporting results. And then lastly, compound filters are how we build more complex query if you want to exclude records from your list, if you want to build a filter criteria where you want to combine and an or statement, those are going to be compound filters. So again, selection filters, sidebar and compound filters are all valuable ways to filter in the system, and each one has a use case. For this introductory webinar, we’re going to be focusing on the sidebar filtering. So why the sidebar? Because it really is a way to easily choose the criteria that you want to see when you’re running a report. So you essentially get to customize your sidebar to say, these are the fields that I use most often in my reporting. So when you go into any report that leverages the sidebar, you can quickly go in, select your filter criteria, tell DonorPerfect, the specific list of donors or gifts you want to pull a report on, and then you can pull that report. So the key here is that the sidebar is customizable, and it’s customizable on a user by user basis, meaning that the sidebar fields that you have set in your system can be completely different than the sidebar fields that your financial director might have, or your executive director might have, or your volunteer coordinator might have, so Every staff member can customize their sidebar to fit their specific reporting needs.

Okay? Now when we talk about the what data this is getting into the specific details you want to see about the records that meet your filter criteria. So if I want to pull a list of my first time donors, because I want to send them a constant contact email, well when I’m pulling a report. I might want to see the name of the donor, their email address. I might want to see the date of their first gift in the amount of that gift. So the what data is really answering the question of, what information do I want to see about the records that meet my filter criteria? So this is really picking the report. So this is picking the specific report in DonorPerfect that’s going to display the data you want to see in the formatting that you want to see as well, because the data can be displayed like a grid, similar to how this shows columns of data, or the report could be formatted where it formats the data in a chart, like the pie chart that’s located at the bottom right hand corner of the screen. So once you have your filter where you define I want to pull a list of X records, then you want to ask yourself the question, what details do I want to see about these records that will help you pick the right report that’s going to show you the information that you’re interested in knowing you so in terms of where we pull reports in DonorPerfect, that’s going to be within the Report Center. 
We’re going to get here in just a moment, in DonorPerfect, we have the Report Center. And it organizes our reports into different categories of report. Within each category, you have a list of reports that include various data points that really help address the question of what data, what information do I want to see about these records? So those categories are going to be located on the right hand side of the screen, financial reports, which tells us information about the gifts and pledges in our system, listing reports which helps us pull a list of constituents, typically for a directed appeal or communication or to get to know the demographics of our donors. Other reports, which is where we put our membership contact management reports, as well as two reports that put your data into a pie chart or bar chart, and easy reports, which is our custom report builder, depending on your package, you may or may not have access to easy reports. You can certainly reach out to your account manager to see if you have access to our Custom Report Builder. If, as you start working through reports, you come across specific reports that you find are super helpful. You can mark those reports with a gold star to mark them as a favorite report. Favorite reports will always appear at the top of the Report Center when you access your report center. And you can also click on the My favorites icon in the side bar of the Report Center to filter to just your favorite reports. Favorite reports are another case where the reporting is unique to each user ID. If you take any of our classes, you probably will hear us shout out a whole bunch of different report names. If you want to search for a report name that you’ve either read about in a knowledge based article or heard about in a webinar or a virtual class in the top right corner of the Report Center, you can search for reports by name and and then lastly, there are over, I believe, 100 reports in the Report Center, if you want to preview or get an idea of what the report will show you. So answering the question of what data does this report include? Each report is accompanied by a i icon or an info bubble. If you click on that bubble, it will summarize what the report shows.

But if you’re still wondering, well, how do I choose which of these reports? There’s a lot of reports it looks like. Let’s break this down even further. So if you want to pull a report where you’re only interested in the people in your database, show me a list of monthly donors. Show me a list of my foundations, show me a list of my small businesses, show me a list of my major donors. That’s going to be a listing report. Listing reports are going to give you a list of constituents, where each person is listed one time, and typically, if the listing report includes any financial data, it’s usually a summary. So if I want to pull a list of constituents or a list of people with a summary of their giving and pledge history, we’re going to build a listing style report. It’s about creating lists to get to know our constituents. So so if I want to pull a report where I want to see detailed information about gifts and pledges and I just want to see the name of the donor included, or if I want to run a report to see how many dollars I’ve raised for a particular fundraising appeal or a particular fund. If I want to look into the trends to see what motivates my donors to give, those are going to be financial reports. Financial Reports look at the data that’s on the gift and pledge tables of the donors profile, and they’re more focused on the financial success of your organization’s efforts. While you’ll see the names of your donors included in these reports, sometimes the primary focus is really on the dollars raised. And where those dollars came from and where they’re being allocated to. If you want to see a contact management report, so you want to see who are the constituents you or your colleagues are supposed to be reaching out to, that’s going to be in our other report folder. So other report folder covers all of our contact management membership reports, as well as two reports that take your data and put it into a pie chart or a bar graph if you want a report to look at the total hours that someone has volunteered, or if you want to build a report that includes custom fields, so fields that you’ve built, or fields that you’ve transferred from your old CRM, those are going to be the easy reports. So that is our custom report builder.

All righty, so now that we’ve broken down these categories, let’s take a look at four specific reporting scenarios. So all right. So we have four scenarios, what we’re going to do and how we’re going to approach this is I’m going to go through one scenario, show you how to pull the report and filter, and then come back to the slide, talk through the next scenario and show you how to pull the report and filter, righty. So now I’m going to try to go slow. So I highly encourage you guys. I’m going to give you like one minute if you can log into DonorPerfect, and I’m going to have you if you can follow along and attempt to run these reports for yourself. I’m going to give you guys like 30 seconds. Let’s say if you want to log in the DonorPerfect and try to follow along with this content.

Alrighty. So for our first report, we want to pull a list of individual donors who live in Pennsylvania, and our goal is that we’re going to take this list of local constituents so that we can send them an invitation for our upcoming event. So that’s our scenario. We want to pull a list of constituents who live in a specific area for the sidebar fields. We’re going to use the fields donor type. Donor type defines individual donor versus a type of organization, this is going to be a people only report. So we’re going to actually pull a listing report. Specifically we’re going to use the constituent summary report. So we’re going to go into the listing report folder, run the report constituent summary, and we’re going to build a filter to pull a list of individual donors who live in the state of Pennsylvania. Now if you’re running this in your own system, then you can swap out Pennsylvania for your local, state or province. All right, let’s go ahead and let’s see how we can run this beautiful so once I am logged into DonorPerfect, I’m going to go into the navigation bar to where it says reports.

And from the drop down box, third option from the top, I’m going to click Report Center. Report Center is going to be the hub of all of the reporting in DonorPerfect. From the Report Center, I’m going to go to the left side of the screen where I have my folder icons, and I’m going to click on the third folder icon from the top, listing reports. When you click on the folder for listing reports, this will give you a full list of reports. You can read through the report name column to find the report, constituent summary. In the first column, you can see, I’ve marked this with a gold star as a favorite report. So when we click on constituent summary, this is opening the report. Report. Now the sidebar filter is the yellow box that’s located at the right hand side of the screen that I’m highlighting in my orange box for any report that utilizes the sidebar, the very first thing you want to look at is, is there any filters applied to this report? So did you or a colleague leave your filters behind? I always advise clicking clear values. Clear values removes all filters from the sidebar fields if there’s a selection filter applied, like there is, in my case, you can click on the X icon to remove that filter. One important note with the sidebar filter for listing reports is that listing reports, by default, will exclude any records marked do not send mail. If you want to include records marked do not send mail, then you just click on the box Include no mail names, and that will include the records that you’ve marked as do not send mail, alrighty. So in the chat, I’m going to have you guys who are following along. How many of you, when you look in your sidebar filter right now, see the field donor type listed, so you can write yes or no, how many of you are seeing the field donor type in your sidebar? Okay, Patricia says yes. So for those of you that maybe are not seeing the field donor type, or you may not be seeing the field state, if you would like to add fields to the sidebar, all you have to do is come into where the filter section is located and click on Manage fields. So under filters and manage fields, this is where you can open up every field that exists within DonorPerfect. And you can go through each data entry table in step one, and then in Step two, choose the field you want to add. So Patricia, you said you don’t have flag. So you can choose main bio and in step number two, find the flag field to add it. If I wanted the ability to add city as a filter field for myself, I can go and find city and step number two and click the blue arrow to the left to add it to just my sidebar and then save my change.

And that brought back my old filter. So I’m just going to remove all of my filters again. Now if I want to go ahead and add my filter for donor type individual and donors who live in the state of Pennsylvania, I go into donor type and click on the binocular icon, and I click the individual code I Want to find all of my individual donors, and click Done, and then in state, I click the binocular, and I’m going to look for Pennsylvania. For those of you that are following along, this is where you can change this out to your state or province. And notice that there’s check boxes here. I can select more than one state if I’m interested in seeing people who live in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Let’s say when you are working with the sidebar and you’re choosing two separate fields as part of your filter criteria. The database combines these as an and combine look for all of the individual donors who live in the state of Pennsylvania. They have to be an individual donor and live in the state of Pennsylvania. Now. I can run my report.

So I can click the Run Report button at the bottom of the screen, and this is going to give me all. My constituents who live in the state of Pennsylvania, and here’s where the report piece comes into play. The report is telling me the name of the donors, their address, their phone numbers, and it also tells me the details about their most recent gift and their lifetime giving. So while my sidebar filter can change because I can pull a different list of constituents and use my sidebar to pull only people who live in the state of Ohio. So let’s do that. I’m going to swap out the state from Pennsylvania to Ohio. Don’t know if I have anyone in Ohio, but let’s see I’m uh, perfect.

So while my filter change, because now I’m looking for people who live in the state of Ohio, the columns of the report remained the same, so the data or the output will never change. The only thing that will change is essentially your list of constituents. So our filter is helping the database know the specific list that we’re looking to pull, the constituent Summary Report will always tell me their name, address and details about their past giving all right, and Patricia asked, is there a way to change the order of the fields in the sidebar Patricia the fields will always be listed in alphabetical order that cannot be changed or customized. The fields will always be listed alphabetically.

Alright? So show of hands. Either you can put an emoji in the chat, or you can say yes, how many people were able to follow along and pull a list of constituents in their state or province, if I have any Canadians in here. All right, I got at least one yes two yeses, amazing. All right, so let’s run another reporting scenario, and again, totally follow along if you want to Patricia three yeses, I love it. So for our next reporting scenario, we are going to pull a list of foundations who have a gift record in the last two years. Our goal is to confirm that we are receiving payments on our grants. So if we would like to pull a list of constituents to look at their giving history, in this case, we’re looking specifically at foundations and their giving history our sidebar fields. So our sidebar fields are our filter, we’re going to use donor type again, because donor type will help us identify foundations. But this time, we’re going to use the date of gift field to look for foundations that have made a donation in the last two years. Now because we’re looking at a list and we’re still interested in the people and the giving history, this is going to be a listing report, and specifically we’re going to use the history listing report. The history listing report will actually give you a more detailed breakout of their gift history. So we’re going to use the listing report history listing to pull a list of foundations who have made a gift in the last two years. 

Alrighty, so let’s go into DonorPerfect again, and we are going to go to Reports and Report Center, and whenever you are switching between reports, you will get a pop up that asks you if you would like to save your changes. Generally, I recommend saying no, so that way you don’t save filters in your reports. This is so that if you come back to run this report. Report later, or another colleague goes to use the report they can have a blank slate for their sidebar filter. So in the Report Center, I’m going to go to the left of the screen and choose the listing report folder, the third report folder from the top, and I’m going to look in the report name column for the report history list, eight perfect and again in the history list, report and with all sidebar reports, the very first thing that you want to do is come into filters, hit clear values to remove any of your sidebar filters, and if a selection filter is applied, you will click the X icon to remove the selection filter.

Always remove any filters first, so that way, you can start with a blank slate for your filter process. Now I want to pull a list of my foundations who have made a gift in the last two years. So I’m going to come into my sidebar fields and locate donor type, click on the binocular icon and click on foundations. For those of you that maybe do not work a lot with foundations, you can try running this report with organization to see a list of organizations that I’ve donated, or you can select individual if you want to look at your individual giving for the last two years. Me again, I’m going to stick with foundations, because that is what is on my slide. So I applied a filter for foundations. Now we need to apply the filter to say, look for foundations who have made a gift in the last two years. In your sidebar filter, you’re going to scroll down to the group of filters related to the gift, pledge, data entry table. So the sidebar breaks the field out by data entry table and in date of gift, I’m just going to look for anyone whose gift was made between August 14 of 2022, and August, 14 of 2024, so again, this combines them as An and meaning only show me foundations that have made a gift in the last two years.

My goal is to double check that my grants are receiving payments. At the very bottom of the sidebar, we’ll click on the blue square button Run Report, to run the report and see my results. So what this report does is, at the top, it tells you the name of the organization, it gives you the main contact and their address information, and below the contact information, you’re able to see all of the gift history. So what this did is it took every gift that the donor has given and it summarized it here for me, so I can see their gift from 2022 21 2018 2017 17, 2016 if I scroll further down, we’ll see the rest of the donors that also have given gifts in the last two years. Now. If I wanted to exclude any donation that was not made in the last two years, so if I wanted to remove any of the gift history that was not in the last two years, my sidebar filter actually lets me do that in this particular report, the sidebar filter allows you to filter on the donor, which means you see every single gift, as long as the donor meets the filter criteria, or I can use a gift. Filter to say, only show me the gifts for this donor that meet my filter criteria. Okay, so everybody, look at the best foundations Evers gift record. Notice how many gifts are listed here right now. When I have the use donor filter selected if I rerun this report with use gift filter, watch how the gifts for the best foundation ever change when I rerun the report, what it did is it removed every gift from the report that was not made in the last two years. So in the chat, yes or no, are we seeing how the used donor filter or used gift filter changes the output of the report just as like, yes, yes, yes, yes, amazing.

Okay, so let’s take a look at another reporting scenario then. So we’re going to navigate away from reports that are focused on people, and now we’re going to take a look at our gift related reports or our financial reports. So how many of you yes or no in the chat? How many of you ever have to pull a list of gifts that you’ve received in a week or a month so that you can send that to your bookkeeper? Yes or no in the chat? How many of you guys have to pull a list of gifts so you can send it to your bookkeeper? So work.

Yes, perfect. So one of the reports that we can look at is the gifts by date report. The gifts by date report is a report found in the Financial Report folder. And what this does is it gives you a detailed list of donations and also tells you the name of the donor. So for the gifts by date report, we’re going to use as our filter the date of gift field. We’re going to use the date of gift field to help us pull the gifts by date report so we can pull donations made in a specific month or made in a specific week. So we’re going to go into the financial report folder, look for the gifts by date report and run it to pull a list of donations that we’ve received this month, so that we can then export that and send it to our bookkeeper.

Alrighty, so we’re going to go to reports, and we’re going to go to Report Center, the hub of all of reporting. If we get a pop up that asks us to save our filters, we’re going to click no in the Report Center. We’re going to go to the left of the screen and click financial reports, which is the second folder listed, and in our list of reports you’re going to look For and find the gifts by date report.

Okay? And again, we are going to clear values to remove all filters in the selection filter, I’m going to remove my filter that’s only looking for gala donation.

Okay, now for the gifts by date report, the date range filter is at the top of the sidebar filter so I can use the date range filter to say, show me all of the donations that I received in the month of July.

So in the date range, I can set my filter to see donations made between July 1 and July 31 and yeah. Yes, this will include donations made on July 1 and July 31 then at the bottom of the sidebar, you’ll click the Run Report button to run your report. So

So looking at the output of this report, if I was going to look at this report and try to figure out where the most of my donations are coming from, what solicitation or what fundraising effort has helped me raise the most money?

If I’m looking at the detailed breakout of this, I would say monthly giving. I’m seeing a lot of monthly donations included in this report. So I can see, yes, I have a pretty robust monthly giving program happening. And I can also assess that my monthly donors do tend to seemingly support the annual fund. Now, granted, this report is three pages long. If I look in the top right corner of the report, it’s going to tell me that there is three pages of this report. If I click on the double chevron in the top right corner, that takes me to the last page of the report, and it’ll tell me at the very bottom of the report, I’ve received 106 donations, and for the month of July, I raised $73,000.

So uh, so the gifts by date report is kind of like a credit card statement. It gives you a breakout of every single gift that you’ve received transactionally, and if a donor has given more than once in a month, like how Nanette has given us three donations, then that donor gets listed out three times, once for each gift that they’ve given. So just like on your credit card, if you go to Starbucks eight times a month, you’re going to see Starbucks on your credit card statement eight times with financial reports. If a donor gives multiple gifts, they are listed on that report multiple times once for each gift that they give.

If you want to export this data out of the database. Next to the Run Report button in the Report Center, you can click on the downward arrow, and these are your ways to export data. So we can export it to an Excel file, a Word document, a PDF, or you can use a custom export template to customize the Excel file that you get when you export data. Check out our export to or sorry, check out our exporting the data you want webinar, if you want to learn more about how you can create a custom report and export data using that custom report.

Alrighty. So yes or no into the chat, was anyone able to successfully run the gifts by date report? All right. David says yes, thank you, perfect. Alrighty. Now how many of you, and this can be a yes or no, how many of you think this report is great, but you would like to summarize the giving. So instead of seeing each annual fund gift listed out. You would just like to see how many dollars you raised for the annual fund. So I just want to see total dollars raised. No details, alrighty. So while the gifts by date report is great because we can get this really detailed and thorough breakout, there could be the chance that you’re more interested in seeing the total dollars raised rather than the individual gifts. So what we’re going to take.

Each we raise, our gifts are about $843 there are 68 unique gifts to the Annual Fund, which have come from 56 unique donors. So 56 unique donors have made 68 donations with the average donor making a donation of $1,000 so this is a great way to summarize how much you’ve raised. See where your donors are allocating their dollars to and if you want to drill into the details, so if I want to see who are the 56 donors that make up my annual fund segment, you can click on the hyperlink under Total given, giving given, and that drills you into the details. So these are all of my gifts that were made to the Annual Fund. These column headers, donor name, ID, gift date, Gift Amount, pledge amount we can sort by. We can click on these column headers to sort smallest gift to largest or largest gift to smallest. So Joe Baggados has given us the largest gift, followed by tandem chain tandem chaining and Pedro Pascal. I can scroll to the bottom of this report, and even export this one group out using an export template.

And yes, I love it. David says he’s running this report now for year to date. So yes, you can shift this date range around depending on what it is you want to review. The other really nice thing with this report. So if I run this from January, 1 of this year to today’s date, so I can run the report and change my date range to get a slightly different list. I can also take this data and put it into a chart. So in the sidebar you have a chart type option. So if you run for multiple years, you can do a year to year comparison. Or if you’re running it within, say, one year or one month or one quarter, you can put the data into a pie chart, so you pick your chart type first, and then come down to the Run Report button and hover over the downward arrow to tell the database. Now, put my data into a chart format, and there it is. This would probably look really nice in a board report, so we can actually tell our board, 67% of our donations we’ve received so far this year have gone to our building fund. 27% has gone to my annual fund, and 5.4% has gone to our other fund, and you can always then export this to Excel word or a printable.

For those of you that work a lot with fixed total pledges, so fixed total pledges are typically where we have donors that pledge us a set number of dollars, and they’re going to pay that off over time, if you Want to include your pledges in this report, or in any report that’s a financial report, you can do so by clicking on the check box under the date range filter include pledges. Now. Keep in mind, if you include your pledges, the payments on the pledge are not included. So include pledges means that you’re including the total dollars that have been promised to your organization, where the pledge payments are the actual dollars in the bank or the actual dollars received.

Okay, so if I rerun the report to include my pledges, what we might see is that your numbers can shift a bit, because now we’re actually including dollars that we’ve been promised, not necessarily the payments on those pledges. So when we click Include pledges, this includes gifts and promises of future payments. If include pledges is unchecked, this means you are running a report on gifts and the payments on the pledges, and this is included in all financial reports, so you can choose to include those pledges or not include them. Karen, when you are choosing the tart chart type as pie chart, the next step is you have to come down to the downward arrow next to run report and then click the View as a chart option. So you choose the chart type first and then come to downward arrow US chart, and that will then convert the report that you ran into a pie chart or a year to year analysis, if that’s what you’re looking at.

All righty, so before I wrap up today’s webinar, I always love to ask this question, was there one report that you learned about today that you are excited to run on your own? And if so, which of those reports do you think you’re going to be using once you get off this call so.

All right, so just to recap what we’ve gone over for today, when we’re working with reports and We’re asking you guys the question of what we’re really asking you, what data do you want to see about your records, and how do you want that data formatted? So the what is choosing the specific report, the who is defining your filtering. So it’s defining which records or which gifts we want to see in the outcome of the report. And you can use selection filters or sidebar filters as a way to achieve filtering your database down.

All righty. So with that said, we have about two minutes left in the webinar, so I’m going to open it up. If anybody has any questions, feel free to pop those into the chat for me. Otherwise, if you don’t have any questions, I hope you got something useful out of this webinar today, and hopefully I will see you in another session. So I’m going to stick around if I have any last minute questions. Otherwise, please feel free to take two minutes back in your day. Oh, you’re so welcome. Patricia, you and you are welcome to Karen and David. Thank you all for your participation today.

All righty, I’m not seeing any questions, so I’m going to end today’s webinar. You guys have a great rest of your day.