Alumni Participate Rate/percentage

Tanya Sorce

Is the best area to gather the number of alumni that gave in fiscal year xx - reports/analytical/comparative and set up a new report selecting alumni only and whatever other filters?  For example when I run this comparative report I see 1,000 alumni but when I run a year to date summary I might see 1,200 donors.  I have learned (I think) the comparative report is better, removing duplicates, etc. where the summary might count the same alum twice.  Is this correct?

 

JoAnn Strommen

IMO the comparative report would be used when doing comparisons.  Like alum to increased giving.  It's designed to compare.


What kind of summary are you running?


For alum who gave in a fiscal year you could use one of the canned reports like Gift Detail and Summary. Carefully set up columns with gift types.


If you want essentially all funds and most gift types I'd just run a quick query: Constit code equals alum / Summary gift info for # of gifts -- gift dates = FY, # of gifts > 0. If you are only looking at certain gift types or funds you can add the criteria to the summary gift info criteria.   No output it will have you a # in 2 seconds. 

Tanya Sorce

Thanks JoAnn,

I really just want to get a reliable alumni participation rate.  I also use the comparison report to actually run comparisons like increased/decreased giving.  When I use comparative to see how many donors in 1 fiscal year I set up the first 6 months and then second period is the last 6 months, then just look at the total constituents.  It became another way to pinpoint and check number of alumni who gave for participation rates. 

When I run my gift detail summary reports I do see a higher number of donors than when I look at the comparison report, which led to my question.  I think I will run the summary report and do a quick query and see how close the numbers are.

Thanks,

Tanya

 

JoAnn Strommen

Do you feel you got a reliable rate?  I just don't see how you could pull accurate #s for that from a comparison report. We have alum who give more than once a year so could be included in both reports. 


A major difference between the reports could be due to the types of gifts being reported on.