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Number-crunching Giving Totals In The Web View

Steve Stegelin

To ease analysis, Raiser's Edge NXT provides several totals, estimates, and data points as at-a-glance metrics throughout the web view. In the database view, you can also create robust reports to calculate totals based on your organization's criteria. As you look at this analysis, it's important to remember that not every total may add up quite the same between the two views, due to how those numbers are crunched in each.While the database view enables you to choose criteria — such as which records to include or which parameters to set — as you slice-and-dice your data, the web view makes some choices based on best practices. For example, under Giving on a constituent's record, you can review their giving history, including consecutive years given, lifetime giving, and milestone gifts. To calculate these numbers, Raiser's Edge NXT automatically assumes specific criteria.

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Years giving and Years consecutive includes:

Fiscal years — not calendar years
Gifts and soft credits, based on the gift types your organization sets up for recognition giving

Lifetime giving includes gifts and soft credits, based on the gift types set up for recognition giving. However, to prevent double-counting:

If you include both pledges and pledge payments, lifetime giving includes the pledge balance — not the full pledge amount.
If you include both one-time gifts and planned gifts, lifetime giving subtracts any realized revenue from planned gift amounts.
If you include matching gift pledges or payments, lifetime giving considers only matching gifts pledged or paid by the constituent themselves, such as on the record of the matching company. (On the record of the constituent who gave the original matched gift, you can view a summary of the matching gifts paid and pledged based on their giving under matching.)

First, Latest, and Greatest include gifts and soft credits, based on the gift types set up for recognition giving.

For more information about these giving statistics, check out the Constituent Giving Help.

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Admins! As alluded to, while the web view automatically sets specific parameters around these calculations, you can choose which types of gifts to include. In Control Panel, Settings, under Giving analysis, set up how to calculate Received revenue, Committed revenue, and Recognition. While the totals under Giving use the Recognition settings to determine the recognized value of a constituent, the Received revenue and Committed revenue settings determine which gift types to include with the Revenue type filter on the out-of-the-box Reporting dashboards and records of campaigns, funds, and appeals.

In addition to which gift types to count as revenue or recognition, you can choose how to calculate certain types of gifts, such as whether to deduct pledge write-offs or exclude zero-amount gifts. As with the rest of the web view, these settings continue to evolve based on your feedback — such as the recent ability to deduct pledge write-offs from committed revenue. For more information about these settings, see the Revenue and Recognition Help.

Should the numbers you see in a report from the database view not exactly match a similar total in the web view, it's likely one of these factors — from which gift types or campaigns and funds you include, to whether fiscal years or soft credits are considered — is in play. However, should a total in either view feel completely erroneous, please contact Support so we can look into it and double-check the math. Happy number-crunching!

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Comments

Tom Klimchak

This is incredibly helpful. Thank you!

Stephen Kubasek

Hi Steve,

This is very helpful - thank you for posting this. The improvements that are being made to configure gift recognition are very useful. I have two questions related to this topic:

1. Will you be adding more options to allow for configuration of the recognition section? Specifically, it would be useful to be able to choose/ exclude certain campaigns and funds. We have a group of funds that are used to process some taxable sales transactions. These funds are all grouped in one campaign. It would be great if we could exclude that campaign in the recognition settings.

2. Can the ability to deduct write-offs be added to lists? We have a donor from years ago who made a major gift pledge which was later written off. Whenever we pull a list using the committed revenue gift types to identify donors over a certain dollar amount, this person always pulls into the list. It would be helpful if we could filter him out by allowing the list parameters to recognize and deduct write-offs.

Thank you,

Stephen

Steve Stegelin

Great ideas, Stephen! If you haven't already done so, I'd recommend adding them to the Idea Bank (the 'Ideas' tab above) so we can track general interest and need for those sort of configuration options. Thanks!

Bill Connors

I agree--Steve, great post, thanks. Could you please clarify the bullet on MGs under Lifetime giving? I didn't quite follow you on that. Thanks again.

Steve Stegelin

Hey Bill! Thanks, and I can see how the matching gift part may've been a little confusing. I've updated the post to clarify, but in short, if you include matching gifts in recognition, lifetime giving considers the matching gifts the constituent themselves have paid or pledged — in this case, most likely the matching gift company. For the other side of the coin, you can view how much a constituent helped your organization raise through matching gifts paid or pledged based on their giving under matching. I hope that helps. Thanks!

Jeannie Goings

This is an amazing post.