Advice on reports capturing an annual event

Scotti Hartman

Is the Giving Dynamics Report the most appropriate use for capturing success of an event which occurs annually?  We have a robust capture for 2017, and then 2018 and 2019 are flat.  Could the issue be journal entry?  Any insights would be most helpful.  Thank you.

Tara Dustrude

Hello Scotti!


This is going to depend on how you track the funds to this event. But actually the Giving Dynamics report won't allow you to look at specific Journal Entries, it looks at Accounts. So that particular report is used to compare two chunks of time overall, not to a particular event. So your Giving Dynamics Report results aren't going to be accurate, they'll look at the donors in your query but will include any donations they made (toward the event AND other gifts).


I would suggest creating your own queries and reports for this because it will allow you to filter on only that event (assuming you are tracking that with a Campaign or Fund or something of that sort). So what you'll want to do is create a query with a data return type of Journal Entries that includes all transactions toward your event for each year you'd like to compare (so maybe 1/1/2017-12/31-2019). Then, in the report you can have a column for the total received each year by using aggregates. The full steps to do this are here: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/67146. Of course, you'll need to adjust the years and determine how you are tracking the donations to this event.


If you need to include pledges/pledged amounts, I would suggest using the Journal Entry Type field instead of Individual Transaction Received. Then you can use either the Raised aggregate in your report or include separate columns for Pledged or Received. If you're not sure what Raised includes compared to Received or Pledged take a look at https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/66346.


I hope you find this helpful. If you have follow-up questions let me know and I'll see if I can help further!


Tara