Donor Advised Fund Reporting in a Comprehensive Campaign

Question

Our University is at the beginning of a comprehensive campaign. I'm working on the reporting aspect. One part of that is showing giving by constituency. Donor advised funds gifts have their own primary constituency called "Donor Advised Fund," but we'd like to show the alumnus, trustee, or friend behind those gifts in those respective categories. I'm not sure of the best way to do that without a bit of manual work each time I run the report. Does anyone have thoughts on how to report on something like this or if there are any ideas on general efficient campaign reporting. Thank you!

Karen Diener · Answer

I've seen a lot of options on this, and I think it depends on how you are actually building the report.  For instance, back when our team was developing these as Crystal Reports, there was SQL language in it to transform the data.  It was fairly specific so used constituent IDs.  Something like PowerBI would probably make it easy to build in some transformations.

If neither of those are options and you are using Query and Export, you could potentially add a gift attribute (aka custom field in webview) to help make that transformation.  I think you would need to construct it thoughtfully to include both the individual's name and their constituent code, but the information would be present on your resulting spreadsheet so it might be easier to clean.  You may be able to leverage PowerQuery to do some cleanup for you as well.

Just a couple of very quick thoughts, but it is hard to come to a final answer without knowing more details about your overall soft credit policies and toolkit for reporting.

Joe Moretti · Answer

This tends to be an issue with some of the reporting using constituency codes because you need to include soft credits and this of course can throw off things with the other constituency, but at least you will get the information for alumnus, trustees or friends behind those gifts.. If you were just doing regular financial report, this would all be fine, but because you want to know the giving by constituency this is an issue with those Donor Advised funds.