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Exporting Donors - going BONKERS

Sarah Woodard

My board has asked for an analysis of all of our top donors (there's about 700) and I cannot, for the life of me, get an unduplicated list of donors and their gifts because of the soft credit issue.

It's driving me wild that I can go to a constituent's record and get a clear sense of their giving history, but as soon as I try to export it, I can't get it unduplicated.

I don't want a DAF or family foundation to be included (unless the record has no soft credits) - I just want the soft credited spouses as one entity.

I can make it work with either a gift export or a constituent - but I'm trying to look at retention and these soft credits are making it impossible.

I think I've figured out a workaround for this project, but would love to understand how to do this for future ones.

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JoAnn Strommen

I've re-read your post but still a bit unclear. This is what I'm getting.

You want spouses listed as one entity, like a HOH with $ total of both their SC & HC. You don't want $ from a DAF or family foundation included for individuals. Do you soft-credit or hard-credit $ from DAFs on the individual's record?
You do want DAF/fam fndtn on the list if there are no soft-credits for the gifts.

Are you pulling lists that include every gift when looking at retention? Or just year-to-year retention? How is your top donor list determined? Strictly on total $ of gifts?

I'm glad you figured out a workaround. I can see where this could be very complex to query/filter and only get desired results. When pulling Top Donor report, I often have to pull more than requested number as I know I will be removing some lines, like spouses. Will keep thinking about it…

Best wishes on an easy solution.

Bobby Steurer

In addition to @JoAnn Strommen 's questions, I'd also be curious to hear what your process for pulling this together has been like so far. Are you outputting a query from a canned report, and then exporting? Are you building a query from scratch? Would help to troubleshoot this a bit further. Soft-credits can be tricky!

Don Burrhus

I've done similar things by having one column for the sum of HC-only giving, one for the sum of SC-only NON-DAF gifts and a third column for the sum of only the DAF SCs.

Sarah Woodard

Oh that would work!! But how do you do that??

Sarah Woodard

I want every gift on their record, but I want to be able to look at overall retention by the donor who decided to give, not by their giving vehicle - in part because it sometimes changes. (Like they give through a community foundation, and then later a DAF, but sometimes personally).

In terms of what kinds of lists, I tried both ways. I just always end up with a lot of extra stuff. The workaround was asking Claude to do it and I'm unclear how accurate it was.

In terms of top donors, I was using $1k and up in this particular case. However, this is a problem all the time so that's partly why I was asking.

Sarah Woodard

I was trying both canned and via query/export.

Dariel Dixon

Summary Fields with different parameters will allow for this.

Don Burrhus

Yes, that's what we do. But that shows Summary. If you need gift-level detail, you might be better off using a Gift Query and taking the results to Excel.

Jeannie Goings

Agree with @Don Burrhus, "You might be better off using a gift query and taking the results to Excel." Power Query is your new best friend.

Kelly Hogan

Just echoing how helpful and powerful Power Query can be in these complex situations!

Sarah Woodard

If you have one set up this way, can you show me how you have the summary fields set up? I looked and couldn't quite figure it out.

Sarah Woodard

Ah, I have not explored this yet. Will try it out!

Jeff Lallo

Hi @Sarah Woodard - future Power Query classes through BB University:

- Friday, September 25, 300-430PM EST
- Monday, Septeber 28, 300-430PM EST
- Tuesday, October 20, 900-1030AM EST

Hope to see you in one of these classses.

Bernard Nemis

Hi, Sarah. That has been my bane since I started pulling gift reports. First things first, choose the Gift Report (not Constituent) route as it will give you more options of analyzing data on the gift level (more granular). This is the process I have (will probably change since we are moving out of the DB view soon)….

Query: make sure you choose "Both" in Credit Soft Credits in Query Options - that way you are pulling all gifts-both your donor directly gave (checks) and indirectly gave (Foundation).

Export: Continue to use both in the parent criteria of the Export (right click the top/title line of the Output tab). Pull the Gift Amount and Fund Amount. This will be an insanity check for you to make sure they are the same amount. With that said, if you are splitting gifts in the gift entry, you will definitely see discrepancies. We have decided to not split amounts a few years back because of this (and the way NXT is pulling reports off of dashboards as well). If you are reporting on Giving by constituencies, pull that as well. Pull Key Indicator so you can take out the Foundations, DAFs, etc. That should leave you with your Individual donors. The main duplicates you need to worry will be the spouses. You can dedup that with the Addressee (provided you use the same Addressee configuration for them). The other potential duplicates will be coming from Parent-Child or Siblings who are soft credited for the same gifts-we don't worry about that anymore.

I suggest you do a trial and error by pulling 1 or 2 donors first so you can manage the different scenarios. Too many donors mean too many scenarios you need to think about.

Lastly, Power Query is our friend. Claude is also our friend.

Sarah Woodard

Very cool, thank you!! I can see the Oct 20th one, but where would I find the earlier two?

Sarah Woodard

Thank you! I will give this a shot and yes, Claude helped me in the short term but it wasn't perfect.

Bernard Nemis

You are welcome. Feel free to reach out. This is something I use on a regular basis, which also include our impact report. AI is good to have, but whatever the last step is, it should always be yours, even if that last step is to just eyeball or sample the data to make sure it's accurate. Don't let AI completely do this task. That way you still have a good grasp of things. Just my opinion.