Reporting/Anaylsis

Alyssa Brassil

Does anyone know if there is a list of suggested or commonly used reports somewhere? Or a training that helps guide you for data analysis? Not necessarily how to build the reports but what is helpful to analyze. Hoping to expand our data analysis and wanted to see if there was a list anyone had of what they look at or if they have found anything on NXT trainings that is helpful in this are. Thank you!

Faith Murray

I have found that the “canned” reports act as good starter points, but don't necessarily dive deep enough for detailed action.

For example, when you are first starting your basic analysis, it's good to get a broad overview of the health of your fundraising operation, by running:

• A LYBUNT report for each of the past 5 years to see what your lapsing rate is – is your lapsing rate increasing or staying the same? The Fundraising/Reports dashboard in webview is also excellent for this, as it can give you an industry standard comparison for what is “normal” for your nonprofit type and size.
• A SYBUNT report to determine what your opportunities are in the universe of re-activating lost donors.
• The Appeals charts in webview (Fundraising - Reports) are highly superior to the database view reports if you want a visual overview of overall year-to-year appeal performance and don't care if it's a couple dollars off. It's a fundraiser's dream as far as demographic data. If you want exact dollar amounts, go to database view, Records - Appeals – open your specific appeal, and click the Summary button. This feature will drill down into the performance success of individual packages within your mailing.
• Fiscal Year reports (in database view) over the past 5 years to determine whether your Funds revenue has been increasing or decreasing over time, and what your average fundraising goals should be for planned gifts, major gifts (for this one, attach a gift query filtering by gift size), and various project funds.
• Calculate your average gift size from your Fiscal Year report by dividing total revenue by total Gifts MINUS any crazy exceptional gifts you got like that out-of-the-blue $6 million bequest. You need an average gift size that is usable for setting realistic ask amounts in your fundraising appeals and donation pages, so take out those supersized windfalls. Or, use the average gift size from your Appeal reports in bullet 3.
• In database view, Reports - Demographic - Comparisons and Summaries, run a report for Giving by Constituency. It's helpful to know whether your breadwinner donors are mostly alumni, acquisition donors, businesses, board members, monthly donors, or the like. This will help determine messaging in your communications.

These are the bare minimum reports any nonprofit should be pulling. With these, you can make strategic decisions, like:

• Can I afford to spend $10,000 on a lapsed donor mailing, if I can generally expect a 2% reactivation and their average gift size is $50?
• Should my gift array emphasize a $25 or a $100 ask amount?
• How much revenue can I expect to raise once my campaign year is over?
• How much should my major gift officers be bringing in versus my direct mail appeals?

Now, that said, there's a ton of deeper analysis you could be doing, which is not able to be done in RE – and must be done either in Crystal Reports or in Excel. For example, if you have mastered all of the above systems and want to refine even more, you might:

• Export a list of engaged donors' last year giving along with their wealth screening giving history, to see if your major donors are actually giving at capacity.
• Export your SYBUNT's average gift size from five years ago, to set customized gift arrays for each individual in your lapsed donor segment vs. your regular mailing.
• Export your online gift info and match back to your Facebook engagement lists, to see how well your Facebook followers engage with your online giving drives.
• Export your total universe of donors along with their giving history to manually generate an RFM value per @Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE 's awesome RFM formula.
• Export your top donors' giving, event registrations, incoming actions, and wealth screening to create a major gift A1-D4 prospect rating system.

The list goes on. But this post is already grossly huge. So I'll leave it there. Hope that helps!