52 MINS
How to Reflect on Past Performance to Meet Future Goals
DonorPerfect Community Conference 2023 session with DonorPerfect Trainer Amanda Tadrzynski
Categories: DPCC
How to Reflect on Past Performance to Meet Future Goals Transcript
Print TranscriptDay Two of the DonorPerfect community conference. We are so glad that you were here. My name is Jonathan and I will be your host for this session. You are in track one and attending the session how to reflect on past performance to meet meet future goals. Before I introduce your Read More
Day Two of the DonorPerfect community conference. We are so glad that you were here. My name is Jonathan and I will be your host for this session. You are in track one and attending the session how to reflect on past performance to meet meet future goals. Before I introduce your speaker, I want to remind you to stick around at the conclusion of this session for q&a with the speaker. You can submit any questions you have during the session. And don’t forget to take the poll in the sidebar to submit your interest in learning more about this topic. This session will be recorded and will be made available to you. And if you would like to download the handout for the session. You can do so by clicking the Details tab in your sidebar and scrolling down to the bottom. There you’ll be able to find the available handout.
Alright, now to introduce your speaker, Amanda is our speaker today. She understands the apprehension that many clients feel when they first start using DonorPerfect and she takes pride in helping them overcome these fears and become more adept at fundraising. For the past three years, Amanda has empowered her clients to utilize DonorPerfect with confidence and help them to achieve their fundraising goals. In addition to her work as a DonorPerfect trainer, Amanda is a proud dog balm to handsome two year old Husky named Loki, you can catch her singing and dancing around the house with her furry BFF by her side. All right, Amanda, go ahead and take it away. All right. Thank you, Jonathan for that marvelous introduction. And welcome, everyone. I’m Amanda Tatra insky I’ve been a donor, perfect trainer and coffee addict and dog mom. As much as I would love to talk about coffee and dogs. I’m here to talk to you guys today about how you can use DonorPerfect to reflect on your past performance so you can meet your future fundraising goals.
As Maya Angelou once said, you can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been. And in my work with clients, I have found again and again that this quote has hold true. Many of our clients know they have all of this great data in their DonorPerfect system. But they’re not quite sure how they can use that data to help them set fundraising goals to improve areas like donor retention, or set attainable goals for their different fundraising campaigns and efforts.
So what I’m hoping you guys are gonna walk away with today, by the end of the session, is how you can use DonorPerfect to reflect on key performance indicator to look at past performance, and set goals for different areas like donor retention, revenue, and number of donors.
How you can use your DonorPerfect data to set fundraising goals for your different campaigns, fundraising efforts or fun designations.
And of course, once we actually set these goals, what are some reports and tools that you can use in DonorPerfect to track your progress, keep everyone informed and make sure that you’re on track to meeting or hopefully exceeding those goals.
So let’s start off with that first objective, then how can we use DonorPerfect to reflect on our KPIs, our key performance indicators. So we can see how we’ve performed in the past and be able to identify areas for improvement moving into the future.
So I want to introduce all of you guys to the organization dashboard. This is a dashboard that every user who has access to DonorPerfect can see, and it gives you real time insights into your organization organization’s success across five fundraising specific key performance indicators,
as well as it’s going to let you set an annual fundraising goal tracker, so you can track your progress towards an annual fundraising goal from all of your efforts.
Now, I’m going to take you in the DonorPerfect in just a moment. So we can look at the dashboard and look at some of these KPIs.
As we’re looking at the dashboard, do keep in mind that the numbers are going to be showing a 12 month rolling period. So the dashboard is always going to show you these KPIs going back 12 months from today’s date.
So let’s see if I can just get over into DonorPerfect real quick here.
Let’s go ahead and get myself logged in.
Here we go. And what we’re going to do is go into reports and dashboard and take a look at that organization dashboard.
Now you’re going to see the dashboard does actually have three different views. We’re just staying in the organization dashboard today.
because this is the dashboard that is going to be the same view for all users.
And we just wait a little bit for the dashboard to load will it won’t it? Let’s see,
I have so much great data in this system. Here we go.
So right away from this organization dashboard, I can see what my goal is for the entire fundraising year, I can click on this pencil icon to edit that goal. To change the amount, or when I want to raise those funds by.
My five key performance isn’t giving which is how much revenue month period compared to the prior 12 month period. So total dollars raised donor retention, the number of donors that gave a gift in this 12 month period, and the previous 12 month period.
Total donors which is the total number of donors that have made a gift in this 12 month period,
I’ve reached gift how much each one of my donors tend to give on average,
and donor lifetime value, which is a protective KPI. This is how much we can expect a donor to give before they completely lapse from our organization.
So what you’ll notice with the organization dashboard is it’s giving me a number, it’s giving a percentage, it’s giving me valuable insight very quickly into the different areas my organization may want to improve upon.
So I’m gonna have you guys look at this real quick. And then right into the chat. Based off of these KPIs, just these numbers, what are the different areas my organization may want to improve upon or focus on improving or setting a goal for?
Can I have you guys go ahead and write in the chat? What are some areas my organization might want to improve upon?
Alrighty, so I’m seeing a couple of people writing in lifetime value total donors, and yes, donor retention. So pretty much the three values that have those red text within them.
While I could go into each one of these areas, in today’s presentation, I only have an hour. So for the purpose of showing you how we can set a specific goal, I’m going to look specifically at my donor retention.
Specifically also because when we retain donors, we tend to also see growth and improvement upon these other metrics. Because donors that stay with us for a longer period of time, tend to give more over their lifetime and attends to provide more consistency in our revenue and total number of donors.
So when we look at this dashboard, this gave me the insight that I may want to look at donor retention as an area for my organization to improve upon.
Now, if I want to see more detail, if I want to look at what my retention was two years ago, or even just last year, we’re going to have to actually run a report in DonorPerfect to get that information. What was my donor retention last year and the prior year.
So let me introduce you guys to the comprehensive donor revenue analysis report. Try saying that five times that
the comprehensive donor revenue Analysis Report is going to show you your key performance indicator data for three years.
And it’s a bit more unique than other reports where we can run it based on today’s date. So the data in the report matches the numbers on the dashboard.
Or I can run this report. So I can look at my donor retention and KPIs based off of my fiscal year or based off of a calendar year.
So let’s actually go into the comprehensive donor report and let’s take a look at what it’s telling me my donor retention was last year and the prior year because once I have that insight, how is my donor retention shifted? That’s going to help me set an obtainable goal for my organization.
So we’re gonna go to Reports and Report Center
And we’re going to go into the financial report folder.
And comprehensive donor revenue is at the top of my list, you can always click on this report header to sort reports alphabetically.
So with a comprehensive donor and revenue analysis report, I can run it with the end date being today’s date, so it matches the dashboard data.
Or I can change the ending date to be the end of my fiscal year,
which just ended back in March.
Or I can have it run on the end of a calendar year if you’re an organization that has calendar year as your fiscal year.
For the purposes of today’s demonstration,
I’m going to stick with my fiscal year, which ended on March 31.
Now, under the bottom here, I’m going to click screen to run the report.
And click OK. I’m running this report with no filter, you can apply filters to this report to exclude certain gifts. I don’t want to get into that today. It’s a little bit beyond our topic. But yes, we can filter out certain donations to get more accurate numbers.
So there’s a lot of info in this report, it can be very overwhelming at times when you’re looking at this as a new user, I’m going to focus in on just a few key areas.
First, the report is breaking out your fundraising data for current year prior year and two years ago.
If you follow the bolded text, these are going to be your key performance indicators. So total donors retained donors, new donors, etc.
If I follow my bold the text down to retain donors, this is where I can see that in the prior year, my donor retention was 96%. Two years ago, my donor retention was 54%.
So between 2021 and 2022, I had a significant increase in how I retain my donors.
But between 2022 and 2023, my donor retention went down pretty significantly.
So I will most likely want to look at what happened between 2022 and 2023, that could potentially lead to the significant decrease.
If we want some insight into that
a little bit lower down in this report, we can actually look at under attrition number of donors last from last year.
By clicking into that blue ribbon, the 251 donors I lost last year.
I can do a very quick analysis and identify are a lot of my lapsed donors, people who just made one gift and never gave again, or are these people that maybe attended an event one time, that isn’t going to happen again?
So I can look at this data and get a little bit of insight potentially into why my lapstone or number or why am I doing a retention has decreased so significantly.
But if we’re taking this back again, to goal setting for myself, I need to set a goal donor retention is an area I want to improve upon. My data has shown me in the past, I have significantly improved my donor retention.
So if I want to set an obtainable goal based off of my data, I might say that for next fiscal year by the end of the next fiscal year, I want my donor retention to be 55%. I want it to be just a little bit higher than the donor retention rate that I had two years ago.
It’s a starting point. I of course want to improve that number consistently. But I’m going to set a attainable goal for my organization to get us started to start improving upon that number. And that’s a goal that’s based on our past success that shows we were successful in retaining donors out of 54%
previously.
So I have a goal here. I want to improve my donor retention by the end of next fiscal year I want to see it be 55%
So now I need to think about what are some strategies that I can implement to improve my donor retention
If
I could make sure that I’m thanking donors in a more timely manner, I could build donor personas to ensure that I’m communicating with donors and getting the right messaging in front of their eyes.
I could potentially also look at growing my monthly giving program, monthly giving is a great way to get improve your revenue, and also retain donors because they’re giving smaller gifts over a longer period of time.
So in the context of this presentation, I’m going to pick building upon my existing monthly giving program as my vehicle to help improve donor retention.
It’s also going to be a nice segue and how you can use your DonorPerfect data to review your past fundraising success, and use those past performances to set measurable and obtainable financial goals.
So whenever we’re going into DonorPerfect because we know we want to set a financial goal for an upcoming fundraising effort,
one of the best tips that I can give you is have a really strong understanding on how data is captured in your database. So really understanding the definition of the four key coded fields in DonorPerfect campaign, which tends to encompass fundraising efforts that are happening over longer periods of times, months and years. Typically, examples of these could be a capital campaign to build a new building.
Campaigns are typically made up of solicitation codes, those are individual fundraising efforts that help us raise money for our campaigns. Solicitation codes are going to be things like giving Tuesday, or your fundraising Galus or your direct mail appeals.
We can then break solicitations out into sub solicitation codes to help define revenue from sponsorships, ticket sales, or our different donor segments for our letters.
Or for those of you that are wanting to set fundraising goals to help fund programs, you might set a goal around your general ledger, where we can set a goal for raising X amount of money for an unrestricted fund. Or we can say we want to raise X amount of money for this specific restricted fund.
The reason that I’m emphasizing understanding how the data is captured in your database, is it’s going to help you pick the right report to look at your past performance. And it’s going to help you then use the goal setting tools more correctly.
So once you have an understanding on how the data is captured in your database, then you can use DonorPerfects reports to look at your past fundraising performance and data so that you can set a measurable and obtainable goal for your organization.
Now again, there are a large number of reports in DonorPerfect that I could point you towards for goal setting. I’m just going to focus in on two of them today. The gift comparison by time period report and the cross tabulation report.
So if we go into DonorPerfect real quick, the first report that I want to take a look at
is going to be the gift comparison by time period report. So going back to reports and Report Center.
We’re going into the financial report folder to find the report gift comparison by time period.
And what I love about this report is I can set a date range to say look at my fundraising data between this date and this date.
So I’m going to look at my fiscal year starting two years ago
and have this report end on my fiscal year that just ended.
I can then take the data in that date range and split it out into a year spread perspective. So I can get year over year analysis for my different fundraising efforts.
And then feel to segment by is where I can actually pick which financial field I want.
Want to segment my gift data for more. So I can choose General Ledger, I can choose solicitation or sub solicitation code, you guys can choose any one of those values depending on what it is you want to reflect on.
For my organization, we’ve tracked our monthly giving program as a campaign code in the system. So I’m going to segment my data by campaign.
And then just come down to the output options and screen my report. So I can see my gift data broken out by campaign.
And I’m just going to zoom in here real quick, a little bit.
Now, the way I ran this report, it’s giving me all of my campaigns. And I can focus in specifically on the monthly giving a program dollars.
And what I’m actually seeing here is I’ve had pretty strong growth
actually had 149% growth in total revenue for my monthly giving program.
So if I’m looking at wanting to set a goal for this monthly giving program itself, so I want to set a goal for how many dollars I want to raise for this program. Again, still keeping in mind, the end goal is that this monthly giving program is also going to help improve and meet my goal for donor retention.
If so, I want to set a paintable fundraising goal. For my monthly giving program, I might want to look at the average between the 42% increase between 21 and 22. And the 149% increase between 22 and 23. The average of that is a 95% increase. So if I want to raise 95%, more than what I did in 23. Then my end goal here is that I’m going to try to raise about roughly $11,000 in 2024 for my monthly giving program.
Again, I’m just using the data that I have here along with some math to set a goal that’s obtainable for my organization based off of my past performance.
And at this point, I could technically stop here, I have a goal I want to raise $11,000 through my monthly giving program which appears to be obtainable. Based off of my past performance. I could go and set a goal in DonorPerfect and be done.
But I want to be strategic. I want to make sure that I’m able to recreate the success between 2022 and 2023.
So I want to look at and identify what fundraising efforts helped me increase my revenue by 149% between just the year
I can go ahead and run the cross tabulation report.
The cross tabulation report is going to let me break out my campaigns by the solicitation codes that helped raise the funds.
So I’m going to go to Reports and report center and pull up the cross tabulation report.
Which I am absolutely obligated to say this is the favorite report of my colleague Sarah Milan.
Literally in my contract, I have to say that every time we talk about this report in any training
so the cross tabulation report, I like to think about as being very similar to a pivot table
where I can pick one of my financial fields to display data along the left side of the pivot table.
So I’m going to pick solicitation to display along the left, that’s the left of my pivot table.
Along the top, I’m going to display my campaign field
and I’m going to use the date range as a way to say look at the same data that I looked at in the previous report.
So look at three years of my fiscal year data.
Now I’m gonna apply
I have one more filter here, which is I want to remove all campaign data if it’s not related to my monthly giving campaign.
So I’m going to apply one more filter, a selection filter.
And I click that really, really quickly. So let me go back in the sidebar, under selection, filter and apply.
I can come in and say Add a new filter. And when I run the report, only show me gifts data.
If on the gift pledge table,
the campaign code assigned to that gift is equal to or an exact match to
monthly giving program.
So I’m eliminating out any noise that’s going to take away from me being able to identify what fundraising efforts helped me raise funds for my monthly giving program.
So now I can run this report.
And I can actually now zero in on these are all of the fundraising efforts in the last three fiscal years, that helped me raise funds for my monthly giving program.
So what this is telling me is that I have actually done a monthly giving specific appeal over the last four years. And based off of the numbers, that appears to be the fundraising effort that’s helped bring in the most monthly donors year over a year. So I know when I’m setting up my fundraising strategy for next year, and I’m trying to be strategic and improving donor retention, and meeting the financial goal for monthly giving, I’m going to re do that monthly giving campaign. Because my data is suggesting it’s been a very successful campaign.
Now, my data is also showing me seemingly that my annual appeal has also been a pretty good vehicle for bringing in new monthly donors as well.
So if I’m looking for additional ways to really promote and push this idea of monthly giving, I may want to look at refreshing the messaging I typically use in my annual appeal, and potentially make it more focused around the impact that a monthly gift can have, I might make it more of a push to raise funds for those monthly donations.
So the purpose of this report was to really take that large campaign number and break it out into the individual fundraising efforts to see what was successful in the past. So we can recreate what was successful, and potentially identify additional opportunities where we can push and promote that monthly giving program, again, with the end goal being that that monthly giving program is going to also help us retain donors over a longer period of time.
So now I have my two goals. I want to improve my donor retention to 55%. I want to raise $11,000 For my monthly giving program.
So how do I actually now track those goals in DonorPerfect and how do I monitor my progress and my success towards those goals? Because ultimately, once we set these goals, we’re most likely going to be responsible for then informing board members, potentially also our donors about our progress towards these different goals that we’ve set.
So from the fundraising side from the I want to raise x amount of dollars goal perspective, we have the fundraising goal tracker.
What the fundraising goal tracker is you can set up to three unique goals in DonorPerfect. So you can see in real time, how close you are to meeting your financial goal.
And the purpose of this is to really keep everyone on your team informed about where you are and what your progress is towards that goal.
And depending on if that is a more public facing goal, the goal tracker can also be a great way for you to inform your donor base about how close you are to meeting a goal for say building a new building or campus.
And in terms of setting up a fundraising goal tracker, it’s super easy.
We just go into DonorPerfect
and we go
Go to the homepage
and we can only have three goals, everybody’s going to have the same three goals.
I’m just gonna go ahead and remove one of these.
If we want to create a new goal, we’re just going to click on Create a goal.
We’ll give the goal a name.
Set our goal amount, which we use our DonorPerfect reports to determine what this amount is.
And I’m going to set a start date and end date. So I want to only count donations if it’s between April 1.
And March 31, so my fiscal year,
I’m also going to tell the goal tracker only count donations if the campaign code assigned to the gift is monthly giving program.
And so by creating that goal tracker,
I’m able to now every time I log in, monitor my progress towards that $11,000 goal.
And if we’re really successful in meeting that goal, and we want to get a push goal, and we want to extend out that push goal, we can click on the three dots to actually edit this goal tracker.
And we can increase the timeframe. Or we can change the amount that we’re hoping to raise.
So I might want to add on an extra $800 to my goal.
So the fundraising goal tracker is a great way to be able to quickly get insights and updates on how close you are to meeting a fundraising goal dollars raised.
Now, what if you also want to be able to monitor your progress towards your key performance indicator goals. So being able to track your progress towards improving donor retention, or total number of donors or revenue as a whole?
Well, one of the ways that we can do that is we can rerun the comprehensive donor revenue analysis report based on the end of our current fiscal year, so that we can actually go back and reflect on our progress towards that goal.
up my slides apparently are not up to date. But I want to add for the key performance indicators. You can also go back to the dashboard. And since it’s not on the slide deck, I’m going to take you guys into DonorPerfect.
In addition to rerunning the comprehensive donor report,
if we go back to the dashboard, there’s another tile that I didn’t highlight earlier, I didn’t highlight it intentionally because I wanted to show it to you guys at this point in time.
On that organization dashboard.
One of the really cool tiles that we break out
for you
is that we take donor retention, you just have to scroll down a little bit, you should see a donor retention tile, and it’s breaking out your donor retention from the previous year to the current year. So I can use this tile as a way to kind of track my progress from April to May,
if I’ve seen any improvement, and I can also compare that to what my
donor retention was in the previous year.
So it’s a great way for you to go and get a very quick answer as to where is your donor retention right now? And has there been any percentage an increase from the previous month to the current month?
Right, so in addition to tracking the KPIs, if you want some reports that you can run so that you can track your fundraising goals, so dollars raised, we can always go back to cross tab, we can always go back to the gift comparison by time period.
I’m going to give you guys one more report to throw into your report tool belt. It’s the solicitation analysis report on
Another favorite report of the training team here.
What the solicitation analysis report does is it’s going to break out your total revenue for a time period by the solicitation code.
So if I want to use this report to monitor my progress towards my monthly giving goal,
I’m going to go to Reports and Report Center
in the financial reports, and select solicitation analysis.
Now, because I want to run this report to monitor my progress towards my goal for the end of this fiscal year,
I’m going to set my date range to be April 1 2023.
through March 31, of 2024.
And if I want to look at just my revenue as it relates to my monthly giving campaign, because that’s the particular campaign I had set a goal for.
I can come back and reapply a selection filter to say only show me the solicitations that have helped me raise funds. For my monthly giving program.
All I have to do is hit apply and do the same filter process that I did in a previous report.
I just have to add a new filter.
Say from the gift pledge table, select all of the records where the campaign code is equal to or is a match to
monthly giving.
And if you’re super, super clever, which I’m not at times admittedly. But if you want to save yourself a bit of time, you can actually save this filter. So you can reuse the filter that’s already built. Rather than having to always recreate that filter each time you want to look at your progress towards that campaign.
That would be I would say a pro trainer tip is save filters, you’ll know you’ll use again and again.
So I can run this report for myself.
And if I take a look, it’s going to show me these are the three fundraising efforts so far this year that have helped me raise funds for my monthly giving program. This is the total revenue each one of them has raised with the total revenue for all three at the bottom.
If I have any expenses associated with those efforts, I can input those expenses into the report. So I can get my actual true net revenue. So actual dollars raised after costs.
And at the very end of the report, I can actually see for each individual solicitation code, I could have set a goal for that fundraising effort. So each solicitation can have its own goal, in addition to the goal for the campaign as a whole.
Amanda, how do we input those expenses? And how do we set a goal for a solicitation code to see it in this report? I’m so glad you guys are asking those questions.
So when you’re creating a brand new solicitation code, you can input the goal and the expenses at that point in time.
Or you can come into this report and edit any one of these codes by just clicking on the blue hyperlink.
So again, I just clicked on the blue hyperlink for the code name here.
That opened up a new tab for me.
And within the solicitation code itself, I can input the goal and I can input the cost associated with that effort.
And so by inputting that goal and the cost or the expenses once I save
those expenses
we can go back into the report and rerun it and that’ll show us then the updated report with the updated revenue and updated goals.
So a lot of great ways that you can actually monitor your progress towards improving your key performance indicator goals and
A lot of ways that you can monitor your progress towards tracking goals for dollars raised.
So what I’m going to do is just recap what we did real quick and then open it up to all of the wonderful questions.
What I hope you guys are walking away with is that you can use the dashboard as a way to get valuable insight into your key performance indicators. And identify areas that your organization may want to improve upon. And you can use additional reports like comprehensive donor revenue analysis to get more detail and be able to look at those KPIs over a three year period.
If you’re more wanting to focus on fundraising goals, so dollars raised, you can use different financial reports to look at your past performance and be able to set goals that are obtainable based off of what you’ve raised in the past.
And you can use DonorPerfect fundraising, goal trackers and financial reports to monitor your progress towards improving those KPIs as well as monitoring your progress towards dollars raised.
So what I would love to do some voodoo magic and hopefully summon Jonathan, from backstage so he can come help monitor the q&a.
Oh, and I love it.
Amanda, thank you so much. That was really, really great information. And I love to see so much participates in both in the chat and in the q&a. So before we jump into the q&a, just a reminder to everyone, we’re on Eastern time. So it’s 1:12pm at 1:30pm. So that’s 18 minutes from now, both tracks one and two have additional sessions starting. So it’s 18 minutes are now two more sessions starting. So please tune into those we look forward to seeing you there. Alright, so let’s jump into the q&a. There were a few questions about the goals. Can you talk about? Maria asks, is there any way to track in kinda goals? What would you say to someone looking to track? Maybe Maria’s organization gets a lot of in kind donations, whether that’s something either on the dashboard, or maybe just a good report for looking at the amount raised for in kind donations? Yes, so my first question to Maria would be to identify what field and DonorPerfect you’re using to track in kind donations.
Most organizations have that tracked in the type of gift field.
Now I’m trying to think because we typically recommend putting the value of in kind donations in the fair market value field. That way, those donations are not accounted in your accounting reports as revenue received.
So I’m trying to think of a good report that would let us break out dollars raised based on that fair market value field.
And Jonathan, if you can think of something go ahead and chime in here.
You bring up a really good point of just first confirming Berea like how you’re tracking your in kind donation. So we our recommendation, of course, would be that the gifts are tracked with a an amount in the fair market value fields not in the amount of deals because someone donates food or clothing or eat something like a stock donation, those technically don’t have a monetary amount, but they have an in kind value or a fair market value. So first confirm how you’re tracking those in kind donations. And I would personally just build a report maybe like an easy Report Builder that’s specific to in kind donations. So looking at the field for fair market value and totaling that field. And then also only including gifts that are marked as in kind donations, you’re typically going to track those using the type of gifts field or the gift type field on the gift screen.
That is exactly correct. So yes, I would do the easy reports, or if you don’t have easy reports, export to file. I think ultimately, if you’re trying to do something that’s more long a year by year analysis of your in kind donations, you’ll most likely end up exporting that to Excel and then using some of Excels functionality to get that more easily easy and Visual Insight into that success. But yes, I would say a custom report is probably going to be the way that you have to go for that. And thank you, Jonathan, my brain blanked out there for a moment.
It’s good to have the collective brain that we do here. Toner perfect. We had another question from Stephanie. I answered it in the chat, but I just thought it might be helpful to like view what this looks like on the organization dashboard. There’s a way you can customize the annual fundraising goal through that is this
Something that’s rolling, or does it go up the fiscal year or the calendar year. So do you mind just like demonstrating how to make the changes to that annual fundraising goal, of course, so for any organization dashboard, and I kind of went through this part very, very quickly, because we can never cover everything goal tracking related in one session, we probably need about eight hours to actually go through all of those things. And let me just zoom out here a little bit. So with the annual goal fundraising tracker, if you click on the pencil icon to edit this goal, what you can do is you can change that goal amount, so I’m very positive, my team can help us raise more money. So let’s do 275 as our goal.
And then we’re going to set an end date. So I can say I want my goal, I want to raise these funds by May of 2024.
So what that’s going to do is it’s going to start for this goal tracker, then it’s going to go 12 months back from the last day in May. So it’s going to go all the way back 12 months from May 2024. That’s what’s going to be calculated in here.
Excellent, big thank you for showing I just think it’s really helpful to see that that visual. And then from Haley. So Haley asked, is there a way to run a gift report directly from the homepage goals? It would be so helpful for our fundraisers to see a quick snapshot, what would you say to Haley? So Haley, I’m assuming what you’re asking is, would it be? Or is it possible to go from this goal tracker and extract the report that would show me all of the donations that are making up this $3,000? Number? So my answer would be unfortunately, at this time, we can’t pull it from this goal tracker, it’s really just there to help monitor progress. So realistically, what you would want to do is most likely run a report like the gifts by date report, which will actually give you a very nice transactional list of every single gift and every single donor that gave to that campaign.
What I would also recommend Haley is going to the question mark bubble and suggested vote and making that suggestion to our developers, I think that could be a great way to actually improve upon the tools.
That’s a great point. So essentially, like these fundraising goals here on the main screen, when you set up the goal, it’s almost like you’re setting a selection filter, when you say I want to see gifts in this date range that have these particular codes. So you can recreate that by running a report in DonorPerfect. And I guess you could make that process quicker by making it like a safe, easy report with a safe Selection filter, recreate, you recreate what that widget is doing by saying, here’s the date range, here’s the particular code I want to look at, and then just manually run the report that way. And
all the detail you see about those gifts. Let’s so I think we have time for just one more question, because we do need to wrap up by 1:20pm. So I just want to thank you again, Amanda. So for leading the session, this is really helpful information. Let’s talk about Marty’s question here. So Marty says that they love these reports, which is great. So do we, the retention information is skewed because they have a major donation. And that we do not expect an average every year, how can we filter them out? So I think they’re probably specifically referring to either the comprehensive donor revenue analysis report, or maybe one of the like the cross tabulation or the gifts by or the periodic comparison. So in any of those reports, you just talk like at a high level of what you would do to exclude if you have like a foundation that’s made a major donation, or maybe there’s just like made like grants that have come in that are all
outliers, from what the normal gifts are. Yes, I actually had a client that had a very similar thing, they had a one time event that was skewing their donor retention number because none of those people gave again, because they only attended that event because a specific speaker. So actually a very common scenario is what I’m finding. I’m at a very high level without getting too much into the details here. We would want to use your filtering process to remove those types of donations when you’re running any report. So under gear and filters,
the tool that you would want to actually use is what we call a compound filter. So what a compound filter does is it allows you to combine two separate selection filters. And one of the ways you can combine them is to actually exclude a certain donor or certain gifts from your reporting.
So at a very, very high level, I could say add a new compound filter. And I could say, I would like to look at all of my donations related to the monthly giving campaign.
But I want to minus or exclude from that list.
And I could say, anybody who was a golf attendee new donor, or major donor, and that’s just the filter that I happen to have in my system really, right at that moment, you would have that second filter being the criteria of the records you want to remove from that report. And I will shout out our filters 102 webinar that dives into this process and a little bit more details. That’s really helpful. Linda, thank you. So it’s, it’s good to know that it can be done. Obviously, we don’t know the specifics of what Marny trying to do. But we would recommend reach out to our technical support team, the, if you have any questions about how to build that selection filter, they love puzzles like that. So essentially, it might be a matter of, we want to see all donations, or maybe all donors minus one, I don’t know if it’s one particular donor, it might just be one person. So you say like, I don’t know, Jonathan’s always showing up in this report. And we don’t want him to so we just literally want to include exclude one donor, which is Jonathan. Or maybe you want to exclude all donations that meet a certain criteria. So all donations that are marked with a solicitation code of grant, we’re going to execute those because they’re outliers in the normal. So depending on your particular situation, just reach out to our technical support team. That way, we can have a one on one conversation with you and get into the details of the specific types of gifts or types of donors you want to exclude from the report results.
Thank you, everyone for attending today. I hope this was really helpful to you, as I have found it helpful for myself, Amanda is a pleasure and I’m gonna go ahead and end this session now. We will see you in eight minutes at the next session. Bye everyone. Bye bye.
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