Appeal Summary in QUERY does NOT match the Appeal Summary DASHBOARD

Alicia Valtierra

Hello everyone, so I have a an appeal summary in my dashboard where I created this route:

Customize > Appeal Summary > Edit > Appeals to Include (all our FY22 appeals) > Refresh interval > Enter

It produced what I assumed was the most current appeal summary. However, I went into queries to pull additional information and created an “Appeal” query this way:

Criteria: Appeal ID : all of our FY22 appeals
Output: Appeal ID > Total Given: Appeal ID to include all our FY22 appeals>
Sort: asc
Run.

they both created a list of all of our appeals and the total donation amounts to date BUT the numbers did not match. Pulling the query actually showed significant differences in the total amount in each of our appeals (over $10k in a single appeal). It seems like creating a query showed more donations totals than the dashboard.

Is there a reason why this doesn't match? Am I doing something wrong?

I do see there is an option to import a query into the dashboard.. I tried that and it does pull the query information correctly in the dashboard, however it doesn't create a highlighted total sum at the bottom of the list [like how the dashboard does], and we'd really like to see that.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!!

Oh, also we're on RE7 from the citrix………………….. I know I know……sigh

Mark Guncheon

Do you have gift types chosen for both? And do you have soft credits set up the same way?

Faith Murray

@Alicia Valtierra it has been a few years since we used RE Dashboards. Since then we have adopted NXT and usually use its reporting dashboards. (NXT Dashboards are just approximates, as you can't customize settings well, but it's a nice overall snapshot for leadership.)

When we did use Dashboards, I remember that you have to make sure to include both Pledges and Pledge Payments in your gift types to get an accurate Committed revenue total. Unlike Reports, the Dashboard only pulls the remaining Pledge Balance for its Pledge amount revenue. This means you have to be careful if your Funds or Appeals run over from one year to the next.

• Example: Donor Sally pledges $1200 in January, then pays $400. Your Dash will only include the $800 balance under the “Pledge” gift type. You must also include “Pledge Payments” to get the $400 paid installments included.
• Example 2: Last year, Donor Bill pledged a multi-year gift of $3000 over 3 years. You only want to pull revenue for this year. You're in a pickle, because if you include Pledge Payments you will also pull in Bill's $1,000 payment this year. If you exclude Payments then Sally's pledge will not pull in at full amount.
• Solution: Dashboards are only useful for Funds or Appeals that live one year, when you can include both Gift Types. If you need to report on multi-year Funds/Appeals, use Reports, or at least warn your users that the Dashboard is only a “rough approximate”.

The other thing to watch for is the difference between Committed Revenue and Realized Revenue. Make sure your Committed revenue shows as a column. Realized revenue will not count pledges that have not yet come in.

Hope this helps. Like I said, it's been a few years, so I may have missed something.

Dariel Dixon

Do you use split gifts? Could it be that some of the gifts were split among different appeals, and instead of using the split amount it's using the total gift amount.

Rachel Cavalier

Are you getting a spreadsheet directly out of the query to find your total and if so, could duplicate gifts be showing up?

Does using Export instead help things any?

Madeleine Holdsworth

Exactly as Faith indicates, dashboards are “approximations”. If you want the “real” or “hard” numbers, use a Gift Report in Reports (you have to use db view for this) and in your criteria you can properly select the date range, the appeals filters and soft credit filter as appropriate. Not a fan of dashboards for this very reason. I have to continually explain why there is a discrepancy between the dashboard and actual numbers we report. Our fundraisers always want the real deal.