Number-crunching Giving Totals In The Web View

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.

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.

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!