Donor Retention

Colleen Smith
Colleen Smith
Second Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Altru® General Discussions

New to Altru, is there a query or report that already exists that will help calculate donor retention, year over year? Thank you!

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  • Chris Nungesser
    Chris Nungesser
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    Hi @Colleen Smith,

    Hope you're doing well. The closest report for Donor Retention is (probably) the Giving Dynamics report. You can find this in two places. On the Revenue tab, it'll be in the Reports section. You could also go to the Analysis tab. There are Reports on the right. Select Revenue Reports and then Giving Dynamics. Both get you to the same place.

    Here is a Knowledgebase article about the Giving Dynamics report:

    The Giving Dynamics report will give you lots of good information. A slight challenge that I have with this report is that it is based on Revenue records. Due to our process for entering gifts that come via a third party (eg: donor-advised funds), Revenue reports don't give us the full picture. So I end up making custom reports to calculate things like retention and I base those reports on Donor Recognition, not the Revenue record. And I'll use Smart Fields to help with the reports.

    I know you mentioned being newer to Altru. Recognition is essentially Soft Credit, but Altru allows you to create multiple types of Recognition (so you can distinguish the type of soft credit, which can be useful for reporting purposes).

    Chris

  • Colleen Smith
    Colleen Smith
    Second Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Chris Nungesser thank you, Chris. I'm learning that “revenue” is a difficult definition in Altru… I'll check out the Giving Dynamics report. I'm also wondering if I should just run queries with Smart Fields I've created for cumulative annual giving and “do my own math"?

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