Listing Reports

So. It is now three o’clock Eastern time, so let’s get started. So my name is Janet Carroll, and I’m one of the trainers here at DonorPerfect, and I’m very happy to join you today and take you through the process of focusing on reportings and more specifically, our Read More

So. It is now three o’clock Eastern time, so let’s get started. So my name is Janet Carroll, and I’m one of the trainers here at DonorPerfect, and I’m very happy to join you today and take you through the process of focusing on reportings and more specifically, our listing reports today. So when I think about running reports, I think about different parts of the process. I think what it means. So here I’m going to pose a few questions to you, right?

We’re all here about reports. So do you want to quickly identify your most valuable donors, thinking about reports, all different kinds of reports, so think right now about the kind of report that you’re trying to generate. And wait a second, my most valuable donors. How do I define my most valuable donors? Right? Do we define them by how much money they’ve given. Is it a one as a one time individual gift over maybe donating over a particular time period? Do we need to identify that valuable group of donors? Maybe those that are your monthly donors? What about identifying and engaging with specific groups within your donor base. Now, thinking of those targeted groups, thinking about the I’m going to think the term, segmenting your database so that you could be sending the appropriate messages to the right groups within your donor based How about those who have given their first gift this year? I’m thinking about this year. Is it fiscal? Is it calendar, right? Was it a was it complete support because of their definition, or because they were asked to? Maybe they were making a tribute gift. So think about those I know sometimes when I’ve talked to DonorPerfect users, they’re including the those with tributes in the same group as those without. Sometimes they say, I only want those that kind of came on their own based on appeals or whatever it might be in social media. So all different ways to think about how you are identifying each of the groups that you’re looking to go after. I’m now thinking not just on that quote, unquote, donor base, but what about those that have certain, some attributes that are in common with each other. Do you want a list of volunteers? How about board members? Current board members, former board members, both of them. Do you identify alumni? If your school Okay, or maybe alumni of a program that you run? So all different definitions here, just thinking out loud for a moment when we think about that created list for personalized Outreach, I’m thinking about re engaging them. I’m thinking about incorporating data that I’m learning that is documented within the database, right? What about my lapsed donors? Do I have different groups of lapsed donors? Maybe those that are more recently lapped, maybe those that are a bit further behind more lapsed, because I feel like the message might be a little bit different. Maybe you’re going to look at those that were lapsed in a particular category that are that are lapsed, yes, overall, but maybe they’ve been donors to a certain category, such as an end of your appeal or particular event. So lots to think about in what it means to you. How do you define each of those personalized outreaches, and what are you going to do with that list? Again, we’re generating a report now for that particular purpose. So when I think about, what am I going to do with that list? Well, sometimes that helps me decide, do I need name and address? Do I need some of their giving history? Do I want to know their flag values, to know some of those different relationships. So lots of potential opportunities here. Do any of these ring a bell? Do any of you think about some of these different types of questions? So you ask yourselves these kinds of questions. Gina says all the time. So Gina, do you have you run any reports? Have you found what you were looking for? Have you reached out? Have you tried, first of all, have you tried in the database to look for what you want? Have you reached out to our support team, or maybe you’re working with a trainer individually? So. So these are typical kinds of questions we ask ourselves, and we want to be familiar with lots of different places of what’s going on within the DonorPerfect screens to help you, I would say, get to each of those next few steps that we need to run the reports. So what are we going to be talking about today?

We’re going to learn about the differences between reports and filters. Yes, you need both, but we need to know what the difference is so we can approach this task of creating reports. Gina is asking, can we go over how to make some of these reports automated? So I’m going to say at the end of today, if you’d like to do that, like after the session, because indeed, Gina, it is out of the scope of the topics here. So I’m just making a note we I’m happy to come back. So if you want to hang out a little bit after we’re done, I am happy to show you what some of the options indeed are. All right, my pleasure. We’re also going to focus here on creating donor lists. So there’s a lot that we could take that in different directions. So let’s get started. And whoops, what if you were looking in your database and you found bunch of records with and you notice different kinds of details, such as what we’re looking for here. Imagine we have names. We have some of the attributes, such as board members. I’m looking on the screen, board members, volunteers, committee members. We see where some of them reside. Actually, all of these look to be in Pennsylvania. Look at this, lapsed donor, new donor, monthly donor, major donor, all of these different stages of donors. I see that we also have their professions or occupations, right? Professor, lawyer, grad student, teacher, chemist, founder of an IT company. We’ve got so much going on. So the idea is that we know a lot about our supporters. Hopefully we’re going we are designating that in your database right? Data in, data out. So we want to put whatever we know in the database. When you want to make sure you put it in, put the data in if you know it’s possible all the time, make it required. If you simply want to make it prominent, then make sure that the fields that you want to get filled in are very prominent. So you might not be able to require the occupation, but make it prominent as a reminder to fill it in so that can certainly make a difference. So we’re looking at all these attributes because we want to use them within DonorPerfect To make them requirements in a selection filter. So we’re going to men talk about selection filters. Now we just saw all these different attributes about a handful of records in the database. Well, when I’m thinking about it now, I need to ask for that occupation. I need to ask when the date of the last gift is relative to today, so I know whether they’re lapsed or whether they’re brand new. I need to know that. So I really need to know where this information is stored, and that itself, of course, is super important. So looking down here and here it is the last gift date. I can look at that for all the records, and that will help tell me, help me find those that are lapsed. And I might have a last gift date range, last last gift date, let’s say between January of 2022, and December of 2023 right? Maybe I want to maybe go back a little bit further in time. Maybe have two different lapse groups. Okay? Because my message might be a little bit different. But if you’re looking for an overall when did they give their last gift? Financial or not, it’s in this last gift Date field, and yes, it’s typically on the front page on the main screen.

Right? You may or may not have a section on your screen called the giving and engagement profile. If it’s not there, look around on the rest of your screen. There is a chance that if you don’t see it. It’s simply not displayed. I have, however, seen that some organizations might like to put some of these calculations on the bio screen. So don’t write that one off yet. Look on the main screen. See if you could find it. A section might be closed. You might need to click on this little. Circle here to expand that so you could see the details in that particular section. So we’ve got a lot of calculations in the database. We don’t want to make sure we want to make sure that we can find them right. If I want to do something based on location, here’s my state field, like if I want to restrict based on who the solicitor is, I have my solicitor, your screen might look different than mine. Your solicitor might be with other kinds of data that you like to have displayed with that solicitor field. So every organization has a different look on their screen, because you need it to be the way that works best, indeed, for your organization. So lots to think about here, but the bottom line is you need to know what you’re looking for, and you need to know where that data is stored, because we need to know where to look for it, where to find it. In order to ask the database to say, hey, go find everybody that’s in Pennsylvania. Okay, I’m going to look at the state field. I want to find everybody that has given a gift since a certain date. I’m going to look at my last gift Date field, right? And if I want to knows who, want to know who gave a gift this year? Yes, less gift date on or after, greater than or equal to January, 1 of this year. Well, give me that it’s one way of doing it. Okay? So sometimes there are multiple ways of doing something, right? So it all depends on, again, on what you’re looking for, make sure that it is documented in the database. Because, as I said before, data in, data out. So we apply the restrictions. So think about the word Selection Filter. Think about that as the restrictions in your database that you’re looking for, and when we apply those restrictions in the database, we might get just a few records, or we might get a whole group of records. The point is that we get the desired data. We get the records that you were looking for, right? So if we were looking for those that last gave in July of 23 Well, we certainly have that right here. So there’s a lot of different kinds of details that you can use to find in this case, Sally and Bob. But the other part of it is, what does this report look like right here? I’ve got five data points that I wanted in a report. So when it comes to the report side, that is, what am I looking at? The filter was, how do I find, in this case, Sally and Bob? What are the restrictions needed to find Sally and Bob, the report is, what does, what’s, what does the report look like? So we have a lot of standard reports. We have the ability as well to customize reports, both in Excel, taking the data to Excel, as well as creating a formatted report that has many options within its own as well. So here we have, in this case, lapsed donors right from just over a year ago. So it’s nice that we have email addresses. We did not include an address. The thought here is, let’s maybe send out an email to each of those. So today, we’re going to be focusing on using selection filters and standard reports that come with your DonorPerfect database, looking at this as a more of a getting started. We do, by the way, have webinars on the topic of exporting. That is another foundation series webinar that is presented at this three o’clock Eastern time hour. The other custom report webinar is called the easy Report Builder, and that is offered at the one o’clock Eastern time hour. So those are the two ways to create the custom reports again. So the ultimate goal, of course, is to be able to use the restrictions, the selection filters and the reports together to create these segments, to create the reports that you need, because they want to engage our donors. We not we want to reach out to them. We want to be able to build stronger relationships. Let’s take a little bit of a deeper dive now into this thought of restricting the data, refining your data, creating selection filters. So when I’m thinking about pulling data out of DonorPerfect, I have a choice. Do I want all of the data, no matter what it’s like looking at your entire database? Say, bring me. All the records, let’s just put them all in Excel. That would be everybody, no restrictions. But what if you wanted to pull out all those in Pennsylvania, or all those who have given over $50,000 lifetime, or those that are board members, whatever the restrictions are you choose, and you could have multiple requirements, such as those that are on the board, or those are currently on the board, or those who have volunteered this year, doesn’t have to be about the money. It could be simply data that is recorded in your database. So think about all of that. What does it take? So this top circle is saying, I want everyone. Entire circle is blue, and look at this. You know, the old is taking a slice out of the pie to find what you want. What if this? What if one of these slices was my board members? I need to find those board members and pull them out. What if one of the slices is my major donors or my VIPs donors? I want to pull them out. Where can I find that that? Where is that defined? Where is that recorded? I might have a recording about a donor being a VIP donor, right? I might have volunteer data. Do I just have volunteer noted, or do I am I keeping track of the volunteer instances? Like I keep track of each of the gifts, gift by gift, volunteer instance by volunteer instance. Think about what you’re looking for, and where are you storing this data? Where, again, helps us pull out these slices of the pie when we need it right and to pull out those slices of the pie, we come down to this right here. It’s called Creating a selection filter, or applying a selection filter. Some of our reports, or quite a number of our reports, in fact, have what’s called sidebar.

There’s a bunch of shortcuts on that sidebar and yes, sidebar also includes selection filters as well. So selection filters, we get to use them to generate reports. We get to create constant contact lists. We can also do mail merges. We say DonorPerfect, I only want those that gave financially between January 1 and December 31, of the year, and the amount is greater than zero. So as long as they gave one gift or more in that date range, we’re going to do a mail merge. We’re going to do that end of year tax letter, or maybe we are using that selection filter to find the donors for 2023 let’s say, and we’re just going to do an engagement letter of some kind for that particular group, which might be quite nice to do in January or February of the year, or towards the end of the year, we’ll do some kind of engagement, you know, for those that gave during the current part of that same year. So all different ways to look at your data, my hope is that some of this is or even many of this is resonating with you, some things to that you’re thinking about in order to generate reports. So I mentioned before, what if we have more than one criteria. So I just mentioned earlier, what if I had board members in one circle here and I had volunteers over here? So if I say or I get everyone in both groups, if I have my same board members here and my same volunteers here, those only that are in both groups are going to come out and of course, this is a smaller group that overlap than what this could be in its entirety by it being in either of those two groups. So we can see that when we have an or it’s a larger group compared to the and which results in a smaller group of results, any thoughts or questions so far. I mean, think about it, we might ask, I use board members and volunteers. What if we had board members and we had those that gave a gift of $500 or more, we can get both board members as well as those who have given an individual gift of 500 or more. Absolutely, if we do that, we have a large group, because it’s not only board members, but those who have the capacity to give. And gave that level of giving. But now I’m looking at, hey, I only want the board members who have given an individual gift of $500 or more. At any time I could read. Restricted even more with a date, with a gift date. So this is where we get the smaller group, the and versus or when we’re putting in the restrictions and setting this up and DonorPerfect, the default is right here. The default is end. It’s not set in stone. It’s simply a default. So you’re able to customize everything that you need here.

So let’s go through a little bit of the process and an example, and then I’m going to jump in and show you what that selection filter screen looks like. Right now, I’m looking at five questions, and let’s look at each of the five questions. So imagine this. You are looking to set a restriction on your database, and the screen that you’re going to has five steps to it. The first step is saying, let’s select in the list of choices, which table or screen has the information on it that you’re looking for for a restriction, okay, what if I’m looking for state equals Pennsylvania, my state field is on the main screen happens to be the main table as well. So I’m going to set, my screen slash table to be main my field. What field is used in the filter? I’m now saying the state field, because the state field indeed has the value of Pennsylvania. So my field is state, my comparison operator. I only want one value. I only want one state. So I’m going to say equal to my value. The specific point is Pennsylvania, but you’re going to see when I demonstrate later that we don’t just type in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is a coded field. There is a pull down. There are choices. Choices might be check boxes, like in flags. They might be a pull down, like in state or postal code. I’m sorry, state or state or province, right? So there’s a code we want to click on, a box that says, look up all the codes for me. I’m going to pick Pennsylvania out, and I’m going to be actually clicking on PA, which is the code for it, so the value is actually PA. The fifth step is, do I need to add more restrictions? Are there more data points I need to find to make that restriction more refined? If so, I say yes in the step five, where it says, so I have more criteria, and if so, I then start all over again and repeat steps one through four. So I do steps one through four for every restriction. When I have more than one restriction, I then come to here and say, yep, let’s add more criteria. Let’s go through each of those four steps again. If there’s any questions, please let me know. Just stop me anywhere along the way. Let’s look at it again. But we’re going to use a different example right now than state equals. Pa, so what if I want a list of my major donors? Well, I have to think about, where am I designating, what my major donor is, right? Do I have a role? Do I have a field that says this is a major donor? Am I doing it differently? Am I doing it not based on a code or specific designation, but am I doing it as time goes on, based on their giving history, their lifetime giving? So we’re going to do it right now based on lifetime giving. So it’s not about filling in a field with a value that says our major donor. We’re going to look for major donors all the time, and we’re going to say that they have a certain minimum amount of money to be classified as our major donors. So let’s look at this, the screen for this major donor, right? This is our whoops. Need to do that one. Here we go. Remember, we’re looking for major donors. So what are we doing? The screen where we find our lifetime giving for the how we’re going to define major donors, it’s on the main bio screen. Typically I see this on the main screen, but it could be on Main or bio. We’re going to look at the lifetime giving field, right? Lifetime giving all time, unless you have some restrictions set up, but lifetime giving is all the money in the door. You may have some special settings within your organization. I want to ask for. Our lifetime giving to be $5,000 or more. So we’re looking at lifetime giving, and we’re going to say greater than or equal to, and then we’re going to say $5,000 so we’ve got our screen, where do we find it? We’ve got our field, we’ve got this comparison operator, how do we look in that lifetime giving field, and we’re going to say greater than or equal to, what are we looking for that’s greater than or equal to we’re putting in the value, in this case, of $5,000 if I had more restrictions to add to this, I would say yes to more criteria, but I don’t have any, so I don’t I get to skip over that step number five, Gina is asking, would we filter total as lifetime giving as their total giving ever so I want to, I’m going to jump into the database. And I want to, I was going to jump into the database anyway. So we’re going to start with Gina’s question first, and actually going to show you something. I’m going to just randomly open up a record here, and I’m just going to scroll down. You may or may not have this section. I’m looking at this section called giving an engagement profile. And I’m looking here my lifetime giving. Here it is lifetime gift total. Is right here. This field behind the scenes is called gift underscore, total. Your screen might say lifetime gift total. It might say gift total. You could rename this screen word or phrase, anything that you want. But behind the scenes, it is always gift. Underscore, total. Gina, however, is asking for something about something different. She’s asking about something called Total. I’m going to change screens here, and when I go over to pledges, I don’t have pledges here, but I’m just going to look at a blank screen. Total is a total promise on any individual pledge. So when you’re looking at the total field zero is actually a real, valid total field value, because $0 totals means it’s an open ended pledge. If I had, let’s say, $10,000 in here, that’s also a realistic pledge, a commitment. In this case, I want to give a total of $10,000 and the rest of the screen would say, How am I going to planning on doing that as a donor? But zero is just as valid as that $10,000 total field. So the total field Gina is about the about an individual pledge, the gift underscore, total is about lifetime giving, right? And I have, and I’m glad you asked, because I think it’s a great question, because I have heard that several times over. I shouldn’t say several. I’m gonna say many times over the years. All right, we when we come in to actually do some demonstrations, I will be in the reports and the Report Center, but I’m going to come in a slightly different place right now, because I want to just focus on this, the process of setting up filters without, right now, being inside of a report. And it reminds us that we do have another place that we can set things up, set up filters in this case. So I’m going to come in, I’m in the settings menu, coming into filters. Yep, I’m not going to save what I did, and I’m going to come up here, and I’m going to say, add a new filter. Here are those five steps that we were just talking about. I get to select my screen. And I think I’m just going to go through that last one that was on the screen that was a lifetime giving of 5000 or more. So that is on my main screen. Again, it may or may not be displayed. Look around. It’s always there. It just may not be displayed. So I’m going to go, I’m coming to main bio, because that’s where I keep my lifetime giving total. And here’s my field. It happens to be one of my favorite fields. If it’s not one of your favorites, just click all fields. I’m going to click all fields, and I can still scroll down, and I’m going to come into the L’s, and I have this my gift underscore total is here in parentheses. If you happen to favor the internal behind the scenes field names, you can come up here and do check this box that says sort by field name, and check the box here and now, if I come down to gift underscore total, here it is. I see that the prompt on my screen is lifetime gift total and. Every so often somebody is has one of these aha moments and changes the prompt on the screen, and suddenly you can’t find it where you’re used to seeing it. But if you know what this is, what it is behind the scenes that’s always helpful. Every so often I need to go into the screen designer or I open up, I simply randomly open up a record and look to see what it says on the screen, because his lifetime gift total, that user friendly name is literally the prompt on the screen, which is why we tend to have this as a default not by field name, but by the screen prompts, just because people get used to seeing or looking at their screens. But this is always a it’s a decision you make that doesn’t have to agree with your colleagues. So I’m asking here my lifetime gift totals is greater than or equal to 5000 remember? No currency symbols, no commas, just put in the values there, all right, and then you can just click continue. If I made a mistake, I can edit it. If I’m saving it for later, I have to give it a name here. And this is all about storing it in a logical place, sharing it with your colleagues, and click Done. We do have a I’m going to come back to the presentation make another comment here. We do have a webinar just on selection filters. So we’re not going to get overly complicated in our filters today, but we do have finding the data you want 101 and 102 they do build upon each other. So if you’re brand new to selection filters and want that intro one, I would do the funding the data you want 101 it’s in that foundation series in it’s also part of the recordings under Help On Demand webinars.

So let’s continue here. So we were talking about before applying selection filters allows us to find only those that we’re looking for. So we need to tell the database what what our restrictions are, right? Because we need to find just those and then communicate to them, get them in a report, whatever it is that we’re doing with the data, right? So we apply a selection filter, we ask for only certain criteria, and then we find a group that we’re looking for. What’s in common here? Right? We’ve got board members and volunteers. You know what? They all have a lifetime giving of over a $5,000 or more, just like that last screen had as well. You can take that restriction of 5000 or more even use it as a contact Constant Contact filter, right? You can use it to generate a mailing list. It’s not just generating that report from the DonorPerfect Report Center. So that is really nice to be able to narrow down your data. But now that we have these four, we have to think about, okay, what are we looking for? Specifically decide the kind of data, the data points that you’re looking for, and either find a report that has the data points, decide if you’re going to go a custom route, you know, exporting, or the easy reports so you can create, you can run something that is standard as well, right? So would anybody, when you’re looking at this, can you think of what you would learn about these donors that have given $5,000 or more, right?

All sorts of different kinds of information. So lots to think about what we want to do now is to think about what kind of reports would you like to run. We have about 25 minutes or so, so we can take as much or as little time in any of these reports that you want, and what I’d like to do is to ask you what you’d like to see demonstrated. And we’re going to, we’ll go run a report. We’ll come back to the screen say, let’s look at another report. So we’re going to, we’re going to run different kinds of reports now based on what all of you would like to see, right? Think about finding a list a donor segment. So I want to get monthly donors. Do I want to get lapsed donors, major donors, those that are brand new, right? Do we want to find those that are related to an appeal? An event. What about those volunteers, alum, board members, you know, think about all of those different attributes. Serena says, Can we keep with the major donors? So let’s go and do that. Let’s run the major donors. And Gina, you’re saying new donors. Maybe we’ll do that one next. So absolutely. So I’m just going to, just in case other questions come in, we’ll start with major just jotting this down, and then we’ll do new donors. All right, right. So let’s come into major donors. Just the order, no preference here, just the order that people have have responded, so I’m going to click here on major donors. So imagine, right now, we are asking for a definition of major donor, and that could come into play a few different ways. Remember, it’s all about how you define, right, a major donor? Okay? Because each one of you that’s in this group might indeed have a different definition of a major donor, right? There’s no right and wrong. It’s simply how you define a major donor. So this one says, let’s look at the largest single gift amount when it’s greater than or equal to $1,000 think about that. Some of you might say, Well, my major donors are those that give a cumulative amount of a certain threshold. And we’re saying, You know what that could be true, right? That’s one way of looking at it, using that lifetime like we just did in that other example, right? We were just looking at lifetime giving being $5,000 or more. Let’s look at it a slightly different way, and say, let’s see what it looks like when we’re setting a selection filter and running a report, this time based on that single largest gift on a donor’s record. We just need to think about what we want to know about these major donors. These lists here is simply what somebody might want to know. You might have a longer list. You might have a shorter list of fields. Everybody has a different need. Sometimes you start with the names, and sometimes you say, I just need a certain I need a lot of details, and you lay it out and that’s what you want to generate. So we have a few different choices, of course, of different reports that we could generate. Okay? It’s all, let’s put it this way. It’s all, right. There’s really nothing wrong. It’s a matter of the kind of details, what do we need to see? So let me jump back into the database, and here we are now. We’re going to go into the reports center, okay? And I’m going to come into reports and Report Center, and what I like to do is come into a particular report that really shows a lot of details in a formatted report. So looking at the giving history with complete donor profile. Let’s come in here. Remember this orange area, options and filters. The nickname of this on the left is sidebar. What I want to do is ask where the maximum the largest gift is greater than, or equal to $1,000 so my question is, now, do I want to only see those $1,000 and more gifts? Do I want to see just their entire giving history? I’m going to answer my entire giving history. So I’m going to say my largest gift, amount of $1,000 or more, is going to qualify the donor. And I’d like to see their entire giving history. All right, do you want to include no mail names? Right? Now, I’m going to say no because I think I’m doing this to do another Ask. I might mail them something. So I’m going to say no to there. You get to choose what kind of details you want. I’m going to leave gifts and pledges checked, but I’m going to add contacts, just in case there’s some more communications, I simply want us to notice I’m going to come down here. I’m going to make mine an alphabetical sort and I’m going to the title for my listing might be largest gift is greater than, or equal to $1,000 this is all user friendly, so you can make it just as you need it to be. There we go. I’m going to click Clear values. Clear values blanks out all of these shortcuts without having to scroll down and look. I’m going to remove my selection filter. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to put my requirement now. File as a selection filter, because, you know what, I don’t have my largest if I had my largest single gift here as a shortcut, I would use it. I don’t have that as one of my shortcuts. So I’m going to click Apply, and my largest single gift is on the main screen. So I’m going to say, add a new filter, and I’m going to come over to main bio, and I’m looking again for the largest or the maximum individual gift amount. And it’s not here. I’m going to click on All fields so I can look at all of my fields and let me come into L for largest and maybe M for maximum. So I’m going to come in here first under L, and I don’t see the largest here, so I’m going to continue into the M’s. And here’s my maximum gift amount. And I want this to be $1,000 or more. So I’m going to say greater than or equal to, and then 1000 Gina is asking, How can we know when it is best to export to file and create a filter from scratch, or to pull an existing report under report center like this one? Well, I’m going to think I’m going to answer that question general right now and then I’ll visit it again as soon as I generate this report, because part of it depends Gina on what you want in the end. Do you need to have a file in Excel because you want to manipulate it? You want to scroll through you want to place like you want to add notes on the same row. You want to manage your data that way and cultivate and kind of keep track that way. Some people like to run a report first, kind of see what it is in case they want to hone in on something and it didn’t think about, think about some of the details that they’re going to put into that export. So everybody works a little bit differently. So I want to start with this and give you an idea of of what else we can do. So I finished. My maximum amount is greater than, or equal to 1000 I’m going to click Continue. Everything here is in order, perfect. I’m not saving it right now. I’m going to click Done, and I’m going to run my report. And let’s see how many I’m going to get, where my largest gift is $1,000 or more. And this report does have the potential to be a very large report. We narrowed the scope a little bit by not including all of the details and hopefully be done momentarily. Here. Come on. Maybe I should have raised that level up from 1000 so I’ll say my apologies now for that. Hopefully it’s going to be done shortly. Come on, we’re going to see that when we generate a report, we do have some different kinds of report options that become available to us. Well, we see the name of my report here. I’m going to scroll right to the bottom real fast. You’ll see why in a moment, I have 218 and you’re going to say why in the world did it take so long to get 218 it’s a large report. I asked for not only the giving history, but I asked for the communications that targeted the targeted group. So sorry the touch points. So here I have the Aardvark foundation. This top section is simply part of this, the big picture about these major donors, and I have some cumulative giving history in the narrative. Those are part of every of this report. Every time you run it, I chose to include contacts in here. So I have my touch points, because I don’t want to berate a major donor. So it’s I feel like, I want to know if we’ve reached out to them recently, and then the box for giving, for all of their giving history, is here as well. So I know that here the largest gift look at this is over $1,000 Absolutely it’s here it is, 1305, and I go on to the next one, all the same, right? And here contacts, here’s my giving history. I have two gifts that are over $1,000 right? And it’s going to happen that way all the way through, right? Here’s my next largest gift. But I want to to focus for a moment on what’s down at the bottom of this report. Yes, I learned that there was 218 records in here, but I also see there’s some export options that relates to what Gina asked. And right now I am under this report, other reports is going to be with this down carrot here. Here. Come on, there we go. So sometimes you’re going to see Export to Excel. Word PDF view is printable like this. Says you might see export as template that’s equivalent to this. So look under the report as well as look at that down arrow. And right now, I can take these 218 donors and literally send my choice of selected metrics, my choice of selected fields here, and I can send my choice of fields to excel. There will be 218 rows of data. So this formatted report is pretty nice, and it has all these details that I want. But if I need something in Excel, I could go directly to export to file, or I could run this report, see my 218 records, and then decide, you know, I would realize I want this sent to excel. And I could do that right here. We go through more of that. Gina in the export the data you want webinars. So I recommend joining us for that, because it’ll show you the different ways and reasons why we might go one way or go the other way and still do an export right? Superfluid. We can always export from the existing report. I’m going to say that, depending on the report you are in, you might not be able to export right away. You have to get down into a level of detail that is exportable. So if I’m looking at a report that is solicitation by solicitation, there’s not going to be any export options except a screen capture to an XLS. If you drill down and then you have transaction by transaction, or you’re in a report that’s donor by donor, yes, you will always have export opportunities. So different parts to think about there so good to get all of these options out there. Let’s come back in now. And we were asked for new donors. She didn’t ask for new donors. So let’s come in here and go the new donor route. All right, what does the new donor mean? Well, they’re brand new, and you know what? They only have one gift. So now the question is, what date range Do you want to look at for that date of the first gift? You know, if somebody says to you, what this says up here, I want a list of my new donors. My first question is, what’s the date range of these new donors? Is it last month? Is it this year? Like january 1 through August 21 What’s the date range for my new donors? Right? Rasheed says, current month. Okay, let’s see in my test system, that’s a good one. Let’s see whether I have any new donors in my current month. Fantastic. So what might I want to know about my new donors? I might want to know the name and the date and the amount of my first gift. Might want to know the email address, simply whatever you want should be defined to help you start navigating and thinking about the different reports, the constituent summary, donor name, address and phone numbers are both great reports. Let’s go into the database, find a report, set up a selection filter, indeed, for the current month, as far as the date range is concerned, and the number of gifts equaling only one. So we have our brand new donors who have not yet given a second gift. So let’s come in here. So let’s here I am in the database. So let’s come into I’m going to start all over, as if we were starting from scratch. So I’m going to come into reports and Report Center. No, I’m not going to save my changes by setup. Nope, I’m going to show my constituent summary report, and I’ll, you’ll see why constituent summary right here. And I’m looking for my new donors. So of course, I have to start from the top down here. Do I want to include those that are March? Do not send mail? Yes or no, I’m going to say no. I’m going to leave mine as an alpha sort I’m going to click Clear values again to blank out any restrictions that would be down here. I have a last gift date. I don’t have a first gift date or initial gift date as a shortcut, so I’m going to be setting a filter. But right now, of course, I need to remove what’s here. I already did my clear values. I’m not going to remove my filter. Yes, I’m going to click Apply. I’m going to add a new filter top center. And I’m looking for my first gift date. And let’s say an assessment that’s in the general area, which is main bio. Look at this. It’s one of my favorite fields. I see it right here. Initial gift date. I’m. So Rashid said, Let’s do the current month. So I can do two things I can do. I can do initial gift date is equal to when I can use this button that says this month. If I like to use those buttons, if some of you don’t want to do that. And you’re, you know, we all think about some things a little bit differently. Some of you might be thinking about a date range. So you might like to prefer to use between and then put in, you know, the first of August through today, the 21st you’re going to get the same thing. The difference is that the initial gift date equal to this month is generic, and you can save it and use it over and over and over again, if that makes sense. So I’m going to come back to equal to and use this month, and I’m going to add more criteria in step five. So look at this. Ooh, look at this initial gift date. Okay, is between the first day of the month. This is something generic and the last day of the month. I can use this over and over and over again, pretty neat. But of course, it means this month. It doesn’t mean last month. So if you’re doing August for July, you need some generic syntax, little bit different than this, but something that would refer to last month, but we’re doing this month. So this is great. We need to make sure that we only have one gift for each of these donors. Again, we already set in our more criteria. This came into here. I’m going to stay in main bio, because in main bio, I have the number of gifts. So now I’m going to come in here. Number of gifts is equal to one. There we go, and I’m going to come down here and continue. So now I have, I’m just now, this is worth saving. I’m going to say new donors this month, and I’m going to say, I’m going to say, and still, still, number of gifts equals one. And I wrote still, because every once in a while, somebody might be giving two gifts. They might be giving a donation, an honorary attribute, let’s say, an honorarium or memorial gift, and then they do another one for something similar. Or they do a paying, you know, they’re paying on something in particular, and then they give a second gift pretty quickly, tribute, not tribute, different doesn’t matter. But simply, they’re giving again. So I’m just going to click Done. I’m going to run this report. You’re going to see the layout of the report, which is what I use often for not only first gifts, but for lapsed donors. So I only have one this month.

So Rasheed, we didn’t find too many. We only found one in here. But we’ll look at this, the most recent date given, which is the last date of the last gift date, right? But I only have one gift, so the first date is the first gift is identical to the last gift date, same thing. So I find, I find both of these in the same place. I tend I like to use this sometimes for lapse donor reports. And just, not just this, the stored ones that are in for that particular purpose. I like to see the name and address. I like to see some of this extra information, some of it’s in the other report. I like the layout. So pretty nice report, right information that we were looking for about new donors. Let’s do another report. What does what else would somebody like to see? Right? We have We lapsed event volunteers monthly. Anything else that somebody would like to see? We’ve got about five minutes left, so we do have time for I’m going to say one more, one more report to demonstrate if you want adding flags as a filter. Andrea, we can certainly do that. Let’s just look and see how to add fields within a filter. That’s a great idea. I’m going to come in here and let’s just run a different report here. Let’s come into reports, Report Center, and I’m going to choose the names and addresses report. So I’m just going to start typing in donor names. Here we go show you another listing style report gonna I am going to keep the box checked here that include no male names. I’m going to keep it as alphabetical. You can always add a title. I’m going to click Clear values here. I’m going to remove my filter. Yes, I’m going to remove my filter. I happen to have flag in here. I’m going. To show you two ways. Andrea, if you happen to have flag on your sidebar, and if you want to add it, if you use flags often, you could always manage fields and add flag to your sidebar. Adding flag to a sidebar adds it to yours, not any of your colleagues. So my colleagues come in here. They’re logged in as themselves. They don’t see their sidebar the same as mine. Okay, this is my setup. Because of what I do, they’ll have a different set of choices. With flag here in my sidebar, I could click my binoculars and select whatever I need. Whenever I check off all the boxes, I click done. So I was going to ask for my current board members. So I can check off one box. I can check off as many as I want. I get to click Done, and I can run my report. And let’s run my report just on current board members. And let’s see here. What do I have? 21 I have 21 board members. Okay, I’m going to remove my flags from here, and I’m going to add you what you asked. I’m going to add flags as a filter. I’m going to click apply right up here. I’m going to add a new filter. Flag, remember, is on the main screen. So I’m going to come here for main bio. And flag is one of my favorites. So I didn’t have to go anywhere. I didn’t have to ask for all fields. So I have flag, so if I only wanted one value, like I just did before, for my current board members, in step number three, my comparison operator is equal to and I click lookup codes, and I choose my current board members. I’m not going to do anything else. I’m going to repeat this, by the way. So I’m going to click Continue. Here’s my board member current. I’m going to click Done. I’m going to run my report. I’m going to get the same group of 21 board members. Here’s my 21 but now the question is, let me remove this. I’m going to run a different request about flags. I’m going to add a new filter, and I’m going to say main bio. I’m going to come into flags. But now somebody’s going to say, well, you know, I want current board members. I want former board members, and I think I might want to a couple of more flag values. I’m going to say include multiple matches. I’m still clicking my lookup codes like I did before, because best practice is when I see it to use it click lookup codes. I can check off as many as I want. I could have my alumni, my current and my former. I can have my sponsors, whatever you need to do. Here’s my current volunteers. Always click Done. It’s going to put you in this all the values that you chose. It’s going to put them in properly. When I say properly, it’s using commas without spaces. We don’t, you know, I know my habit is a comment like I automatically, without even thinking about it, hit the space bar, but actually says, don’t use commas. It is an easy best practice to just click look up codes. It’s going to make sure you have your current codes, in case somebody cleaned anything up and re renamed anything. You have all the right codes that you’re asking for, and they’re in here the right way. And then you click continue and save it, of course, if you need it, and then click Done, and then simply run your report. So does that help you? Andrea, so I showed one. I showed many. There’s also the excludes, you know, like, don’t include, you know, make sure that certain flags are not included in the report, you know, all of that. So that becomes, I’m going to say, super nice. So what I’m going to do now is I’m just going to hop over to our recap, because we used our time well, your choice of what we wanted demonstrated learning different reports about the options with selection filters, and that’s always super helpful. So we saw the listening reports helps us create lists of constituents, and it’s going to help us with all those target lists that we’re looking for right make sure that we’re asking for the right kind of information.

If you’re looking for dates, make sure you’re you know that step one in setting a selection filter, some people skip over it, and I It upsets me. Best practice use step one. Make it a habit early to use step one. I have seen people select the wrong date fields, you know, today, the question was about the total field, you know, there’s the difference between gift underscore total and total very different from each other. Just as the date of the gift is very different than the volunteer date or the date of the last gift. There’s so many date related fields, so be in the. Habit of always starting with step number one and knowing where the data is located that you’re looking for. And that’s very helpful from beginning to end, to be honest. So filters help us choose all those records that we’re looking for, right? Imagine you’re saying I want to see a list of fill in the blank, that’s what I’m looking for. We found our new donors. We found some major donors. We found current board members. You know, all sorts of world that we’re looking for. So remember that the reports is what you want to see. What’s that visual? Think about what you’re looking at on the report itself. And that’s going to answer that earlier question about, Do I go to Excel? Well, maybe if that’s what you want to look at, if that’s what you wanted to create, then you want to go down that route. Some people like to create that formatted report for some people, and then that export maybe for somebody else. Do whatever’s needed, but the report’s going to be what data points are in there. What do you need to see or know about as this says, right? So the filters that we use, those refinements, those criteria, to get that slice out of the pie that we saw earlier, right? We can take that, save it, and use it elsewhere, like saying, Oh, this is the best list that I have right here. I’m going to mail to them. Okay, I looked at my laps donors or my new donors, this is exactly the list that I’m going to use for merge from, for phone calls, for whatever it might be, right? Set it up in constant contact. Use our mailings, mail merge function, all different kinds of engagement opportunities.

So I’m happy to answer any questions. I want to thank everybody for a wonderful, engaging conversation. Today I am going to come back into the database. I know Gina. We’re at the hour mark now. I know that Gina asked for automation, so I’m not sure if anybody else has any questions, but I’m happy to answer any sense related directly to this first, of course, comes before the automation questions. Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you all. 

So I’m going to answer about automating reports, and let me make sure that I didn’t miss anything else about the Okay, how to make some of these reports automated? So let’s come into reports and reports center. Gina, my pleasure. Heidi, thank you. Heidi and Rashid, thank you. Thank you. When I’m thinking about automating, okay, I’m thinking about scheduling. So when I’m thinking about scheduling, if you want to know if you have any scheduled reports, you come in here reports, Report Center, and come to the bottom left and see scheduled my test database here has 100 scheduled reports, you might have anywhere from zero to 100 depends on your donorperfect package. So what is So, assuming that you have any scheduled reports, my first comment is that every easy report can be automated, and I’m saying scheduled. So we’re changing the word automated to be scheduled. Okay? Because there’s another option I’m going to throw in in just a moment. So I’m going to just open up one of these some click I clicked on easy reports, and now I’m going to open this report up. It says gifts by General Ledger. This is simply just a random click here. As long as I’m in easy reports, I’m just clicking on any of these, because every one of these in the bottom left has a schedule option. Schedule option will always give you the opportunity to send a report daily, weekly or monthly. You can give it a nickname here for Schedule name, and you get to decide what format remember these reports will come as an attachment to whoever you send it to. So you get to decide on the format of that attachment. When you do daily you know, you decide before eight or after five. When it comes to weekly, you just select the day of the week again, before eight or after five. When it comes to monthly, you’re expected to put in a day of the week, I’m sorry, the day of the month. The only thing that is possible, besides a number in here, is the word last you could literally whoops. My Password Manager is getting in the way here. I could type in the word last. I apologize, I can’t see behind that. Now we can so you can actually have the word last in here. So if you’re scheduling something on the first day of the month or the you might schedule something on the first day of the month. The for the prior month, something like that, whatever you need, okay, but it has to be a number when you do monthly, or it can only the only other acceptable value here is the word last you can see here, right? You can put in a how the maximum 200 characters, but you can put an email address separated by commas, and you get to type in a custom message, and the original name of the report is here, and, of course, it’s going to have an attachment that you give it. So that’s that’s what scheduling is all about. Let me X out of here. When you have schedule, you also have send. Send allows you to send the report without like, it’s a one time, like, right now I simply, I don’t even have to run this report first. I don’t even have to have it sitting on my screen. I can simply click this send and fill it out. The only thing’s missing from that last screen is that frequency, daily, weekly or monthly, because the answer is now in this very minute, right? So that’s really nice. So when I come back to here, I said that every easy report can be scheduled. And now I’m going to change my folder here, and I don’t remember which ones, but I’m going to click on solicitation analysis. There’s a handful of these reports that also have that clock for scheduled and that paper airplane for send. Clearly, this one does not have it, okay, so some of the other reports that are in the other folders can be scheduled, okay, so just look in that bottom left for that clock, okay, first and the word schedule, okay, and that’s how you’ll know right away, immediately. So you’re asking for automation. Gina, so automation sometimes means not scheduling and not automatically sending it, but simply setting it up so it’s ready to use any time that you want that you don’t have to set it up each and every time in that kind of automation, click on Reports and dashboard make your make sure you are on your personal dashboard, which is my dashboard, and then look at the section called reports. In reports you can add, it says, Add slash, delete reports. This is going to add a setup of, I’m going to say almost every report, there’s a few reports for that I could think of that are not possible to add here, but every report, I’ve other report I’ve not had any problems, like they’re in the list. As long as they’re in the list, you can put them here. There’s just four reports that I’m aware of that are not in the list to add here, export to file counter report and the pie chart and monthly giving, the monthly giving comparison chart, which is a bar chart. There’s the only four that I have found that simply are not on the list that I’ve looked for because I, you know, like those reports, I use them and I not. I can’t put that here. I’ll just have to go into the Report Center to run those. So you can set it up here. Just follow each of the prompts and set them up. Gina says I asked it simply to see the total and breakdown of new donors each month. And when you say the breakdown of new donors, decide what you mean by that. Create an easy report here. Right reports? Easy Report Builder, or come into Report Center and add right here. Create a report that is organized. You know, you say breakdown of new donors each month. So design a report that has some groupings. Your selection filter can easily be like new donors last month. So initial gift date is last month. And yes, just reach out to support or trainer. We can. There’s a knowledge base article, okay, just so you can search in the knowledge base to get the syntax so you can have last month. So automate, schedule a report that is an easy report, so it’s organized with all your details, and then your filter is going to be generic, so you don’t have to touch it ever, and it can be there that says last month. Pretty nice. My pleasure. This is a lot of good time saving opportunities. So I’m glad you’re asking the questions. Any other questions love to I know that we all learn from each other, so my hope is that you’re getting some of this, these extra ways of using DonorPerfect and reporting based on Jesus questions just recently. So there’s a lot of people that are chiming in or agreeing or giving suggestions. So I’m hoping that you will have takeaways from this. Is there any. Thing else that I could help you with today. So please join us for more report related and filter related webinars. The more familiar you get with what is already created, then you’ll know you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Decide if you if it presents what you’re looking for, if not, then you go custom, but see if it already is there saves you time, and there’s a lot of value added built into many reports that are already created for you.

So I’m going to answer about automating reports, and let me make sure that I didn’t miss anything else about the Okay, how to make some of these reports automated? So let’s come into reports and reports center. Gina, my pleasure. Heidi, thank you. Heidi and Rashid, thank you. Thank you. When I’m thinking about automating, okay, I’m thinking about scheduling. So when I’m thinking about scheduling, if you want to know if you have any scheduled reports, you come in here reports, Report Center, and come to the bottom left and see scheduled my test database here has 100 scheduled reports, you might have anywhere from zero to 100 depends on your donorperfect package. So what is So, assuming that you have any scheduled reports, my first comment is that every easy report can be automated, and I’m saying scheduled. So we’re changing the word automated to be scheduled. Okay? Because there’s another option I’m going to throw in in just a moment. So I’m going to just open up one of these some click I clicked on easy reports, and now I’m going to open this report up. It says gifts by General Ledger. This is simply just a random click here. As long as I’m in easy reports, I’m just clicking on any of these, because every one of these in the bottom left has a schedule option. Schedule option will always give you the opportunity to send a report daily, weekly or monthly. You can give it a nickname here for Schedule name, and you get to decide what format remember these reports will come as an attachment to whoever you send it to. So you get to decide on the format of that attachment. When you do daily you know, you decide before eight or after five. When it comes to weekly, you just select the day of the week again, before eight or after five. When it comes to monthly, you’re expected to put in a day of the week, I’m sorry, the day of the month. The only thing that is possible, besides a number in here, is the word last you could literally whoops. My Password Manager is getting in the way here. I could type in the word last. I apologize, I can’t see behind that. Now we can so you can actually have the word last in here. So if you’re scheduling something on the first day of the month or the you might schedule something on the first day of the month. The for the prior month, something like that, whatever you need, okay, but it has to be a number when you do monthly, or it can only the only other acceptable value here is the word last you can see here, right? You can put in a how the maximum 200 characters, but you can put an email address separated by commas, and you get to type in a custom message, and the original name of the report is here, and, of course, it’s going to have an attachment that you give it. So that’s that’s what scheduling is all about. Let me X out of here. When you have schedule, you also have send. Send allows you to send the report without like, it’s a one time, like, right now I simply, I don’t even have to run this report first. I don’t even have to have it sitting on my screen. I can simply click this send and fill it out. The only thing’s missing from that last screen is that frequency, daily, weekly or monthly, because the answer is now in this very minute, right? So that’s really nice. So when I come back to here, I said that every easy report can be scheduled. And now I’m going to change my folder here, and I don’t remember which ones, but I’m going to click on solicitation analysis. There’s a handful of these reports that also have that clock for scheduled and that paper airplane for send. Clearly, this one does not have it, okay, so some of the other reports that are in the other folders can be scheduled, okay, so just look in that bottom left for that clock, okay, first and the word schedule, okay, and that’s how you’ll know right away, immediately. So you’re asking for automation. Gina, so automation sometimes means not scheduling and not automatically sending it, but simply setting it up so it’s ready to use any time that you want that you don’t have to set it up each and every time in that kind of automation, click on Reports and dashboard make your make sure you are on your personal dashboard, which is my dashboard, and then look at the section called reports. In reports you can add, it says, Add slash, delete reports. This is going to add a setup of, I’m going to say almost every report, there’s a few reports for that I could think of that are not possible to add here, but every report, I’ve other report I’ve not had any problems, like they’re in the list. As long as they’re in the list, you can put them here. There’s just four reports that I’m aware of that are not in the list to add here, export to file counter report and the pie chart and monthly giving, the monthly giving comparison chart, which is a bar chart. There’s the only four that I have found that simply are not on the list that I’ve looked for because I, you know, like those reports, I use them and I not. I can’t put that here. I’ll just have to go into the Report Center to run those. So you can set it up here. Just follow each of the prompts and set them up. Gina says I asked it simply to see the total and breakdown of new donors each month. And when you say the breakdown of new donors, decide what you mean by that. Create an easy report here. Right reports? Easy Report Builder, or come into Report Center and add right here. Create a report that is organized. You know, you say breakdown of new donors each month. So design a report that has some groupings. Your selection filter can easily be like new donors last month. So initial gift date is last month. And yes, just reach out to support or trainer. We can. There’s a knowledge base article, okay, just so you can search in the knowledge base to get the syntax so you can have last month. So automate, schedule a report that is an easy report, so it’s organized with all your details, and then your filter is going to be generic, so you don’t have to touch it ever, and it can be there that says last month. Pretty nice. My pleasure. This is a lot of good time saving opportunities. So I’m glad you’re asking the questions. Any other questions love to I know that we all learn from each other, so my hope is that you’re getting some of this, these extra ways of using donorperfect and reporting based on Jesus questions just recently. So there’s a lot of people that are chiming in or agreeing or giving suggestions. So I’m hoping that you will have takeaways from this. Is there any. Thing else that I could help you with today. So please join us for more report related and filter related webinars. The more familiar you get with what is already created, then you’ll know you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Decide if you if it presents what you’re looking for, if not, then you go custom, but see if it already is there saves you time, and there’s a lot of value added built into many reports that are already created for you.

Are there any other questions?

My pleasure. Gina, thank you so again. Thank you for joining us today. Look forward to having you join us at more webinars. Have a great, wonderful day. Everybody. Take care. Thank you. Joni, appreciate it.