Get Started With Insights

Steve Stegelin

While both Raiser's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT provide useful analysis out-of-the-box, you can design your own as insights. With this custom analysis, you can analyze measures in context of various characteristics — or attributes — to best meet your specialized needs and drive action.

 
To visualize your data, you can build insights as tables or charts. Regardless of the format, it's all about pairing measures and attributes to uncover the analysis  you want.

Choose what you want to measure. These are your numbers — your totals, amounts, averages, and so on — like gift or budget amounts.


To narrow the focus of a measure used with an insight, select it and then select Add attribute filter to choose the characteristic and criteria of the records to include.

Choose the attribute to analyze with the measure. These are the characteristics of the records to break the measure down by, such as gift types for giving totals in Raiser's Edge NXT, or account categories for budget amounts in Financial Edge NXT.


To analyze the measure based on a date like when a gift or account was added, apply the Date attribute and choose which date to track and at which interval, like day, year, or quarter. (For year-over-year analysis, apply the Date attribute and then select the measure and compare to the same period in previous year.)


When you add an attribute to an insight, it divides the measure into the total number of records across the attribute's different criteria. To instead show the percentage of records across the criteria, select the measure and then show in %.

Fine-tune your analysis.  As you design your table or chart, tweak the insight to hone in on the numbers you really want to analyze!

• To further define the characteristics of the records to include, add or adjust filters.
• To futher break down a bar, column, or line chart, apply another attribute to stack or segment its measure by.

Most importantly, don't hesitate to play with your data and slice and dice measures and attributes, all to discover new — ahem! — insight into your fundraising or finances.