Featured Module: Fundraising 50 Module
October 2nd, 2008 by Susan Low Saadat For this newsletter, I was charged with the task of writing about one of Fundraising 50’s modules. As a result, I’m focusing on the most-desired and seemingly
east-understood module of all: Reports.
Reports in FR 50 fall into three main categories and several smaller ones. The main categories are constituent, financial and analytical reports.
Constituent reports give you information about individuals or organizations in your database. They’re typically used for creating mailing lists or donor profiles. People often use these to pull transaction information for constituents, as well. While this is okay, it’s important to note that a constituent will appear in the list for the report as many times as he or she meets the criteria being used to pull it. So, if Johnny gave three $50 gifts between June of last year and today, he’ll show up three times in the list (assuming you haven’t created a query in which he would only meet the test condition once).
Financial reports are designed to give you information about specific transactions. Here, you can pull a list of donors by their level, such as “Gold”, “Silver”, or “Platinum” for your annual report. You can also pull a gift acknowledgement report that will allow you to quickly and easily thank your constituents. Find out who gave last year but hasn’t participated this year with the LYBUNT report. There’s also the super-handy gift/pledge/payment log, handy for everything from checking on lists of donors to reconciling the month-end info with accounting.
Analytical reports give you a sense of the “big picture”. How is the fall solicitation
doing this year as compared to last? How many of our alumni from the class of 2000 participated in the annual campaign this year? These are the kinds of reports that get Executive Directors out of bed in the morning. (They live for this stuff).
I receive more questions about reports than anything else. I have a few pieces of advice to offer around them. The easiest and best thing you can do to help yourself understand reports better is to go to Help>Product Guides>Reports guide and download a copy of the reports guide to keep handy. This will give you a chance to look to see if the format of the report is close to what you need. Second, remember that even the reports guide is only a guide, your reports will look different based on the options you choose to include. Last, but certainly not least, be CLEAR about what you actually need in the report you are trying to run. Spell it out clearly for yourself, and ask questions of the people who requested the report. There’s a big difference between asking for a list of last year’s donors and a list of donors from the last fiscal year. Both you and the requestor need to be aware of that.
Happy reporting!
