Annual Giving Dashboard KPI and Informatic Ideas

James Rhodes

Howdy all!

My name is James and I'm stepping into a new role as an Assistant Director of Annual Giving. I intend on creating a master dashboard that allows my team to compare YoY and MoM periods from Appeals, Gift types, Funds, and potentially other fields based on suggestions provided. If you could tell me a little about what your insights/dashboard look like and what makes them work or if you could assist me with any limitations I might run into, that would be greatly appreciated!

Karen Diener

@James Rhodes:

Howdy all!

My name is James and I'm stepping into a new role as an Assistant Director of Annual Giving. I intend on creating a master dashboard that allows my team to compare YoY and MoM periods from Appeals, Gift types, Funds, and potentially other fields based on suggestions provided. If you could tell me a little about what your insights/dashboard look like and what makes them work or if you could assist me with any limitations I might run into, that would be greatly appreciated!

Hi James,

Out of the box options include the slightly configurable charts under Fundraising | Reporting in webview, and anything that you might be able to design in Analysis | Report Builder. Report Builder is the only way that you will be able to design a single dashboard displaying various components, but you cannot do year over year or month over month comparisons. In a nutshell, you cannot get what you want without additional money and resources.

One option is to purchase Insight Designer which is a more robust reporting tool within webview. I'm not working with any clients who have it, so I am not sure about its capabilities.

Another option would involve contracting with a third party who could do this for you, likely in Power BI. You could certainly take that on internally, but not sure if your organization has the staffing or budget in place to devote to the setup and learning that will be required.

Karen

Alex Wong

@James Rhodes
Capability in Insight Designer is also limited.

As a starting point, you can just export gift data from RE database view's query. Use that data and do some excel magic to create dashboard and charts that does what you want, this will requires you to manually export everytime to update the raw data part of the excel file, the dashboard and chart should update as long as raw data columns remain the same.

From there, you can explore using Power Query (available in Excel as well) to “get” data from a data source (that source can be where you saved the export from RE database view, which can be SharePoint, OneDrive, or other supported cloud location). This is very simliar to what I mentioned above, except a “cleaner” refresh of the raw data.

Next milestone, use Power BI (or other BI visualization tool), instead of excel's chart, but still uses Power Query to get data from the exported data as mentioned on first approach.

Depending on your need, this may be good enough. OR if you want to automate, rather than always exporting from database view manually, you can consider buying RE:Queue service from Blackbaud which automates the export of query/export from RE database view. However, you will still need to do some work to automate the “download” of the data and storing it into the cloud location that can be picked up by Power BI.

More options become available if you got to this point, but this is the time/resource investment that you/your org has to put forth as mentioned by Karen.