Has anyone used Crystal Reports to create a custom membership report?

Cheena DeAraujoDesir

We are attempting to centralize our weekly reporting  and I was trying to figure out which items to use to pull a report that tracks new acquisitions, renewals/rejoins and upgrades as well as total paid and comp memberships. Has anyone built anything like this or can explain what are the necessary data points to pull? Let me know.

James Andrews

Cheena DeAraujo-Desir:

We are attempting to centralize our weekly reporting  and I was trying to figure out which items to use to pull a report that tracks new acquisitions, renewals/rejoins and upgrades as well as total paid and comp memberships. Has anyone built anything like this or can explain what are the necessary data points to pull? Let me know.

Is it only membership? The first step is deciding whether you want a membership export or a constituent export. Most of the fields are available in either, but it can be confusing and you could end up with more information than you really want if you use a constituent export. But you'll be really limited to membership data if you use a membership export.

Either way, base your query on a Membership History transaction date, and make that an ask field. This means your user will be asked for the transaction date when they run the export, which will make things more flexible.

As far as what data to export, I also found that the first membership transaction that exports when you choose the History section under Membership in Export, is the same as the transaction in Current. So unless you really want to restrict yourself to only the current membership, you can just use History. You'll want transaction date, type, category, program, renewal/rejoin type, if it's a gift/comp, etc etc - whatever data you need.

A warning that the Dues field is kind of problematic, in that it's a currency field people can just type in, which makes it prone to errors. So if this is supposed to be any kind of financial report, you'll want to export the Linked Gift information below, including the Applied Amount, maybe the gift amount from the gift record, maybe the appeal if you're using them, campaigns and funds, etc.

Cheena DeAraujoDesir

James Andrews:

Cheena DeAraujo-Desir:

We are attempting to centralize our weekly reporting  and I was trying to figure out which items to use to pull a report that tracks new acquisitions, renewals/rejoins and upgrades as well as total paid and comp memberships. Has anyone built anything like this or can explain what are the necessary data points to pull? Let me know.

Is it only membership? The first step is deciding whether you want a membership export or a constituent export. Most of the fields are available in either, but it can be confusing and you could end up with more information than you really want if you use a constituent export. But you'll be really limited to membership data if you use a membership export.

Either way, base your query on a Membership History transaction date, and make that an ask field. This means your user will be asked for the transaction date when they run the export, which will make things more flexible.

As far as what data to export, I also found that the first membership transaction that exports when you choose the History section under Membership in Export, is the same as the transaction in Current. So unless you really want to restrict yourself to only the current membership, you can just use History. You'll want transaction date, type, category, program, renewal/rejoin type, if it's a gift/comp, etc etc - whatever data you need.

A warning that the Dues field is kind of problematic, in that it's a currency field people can just type in, which makes it prone to errors. So if this is supposed to be any kind of financial report, you'll want to export the Linked Gift information below, including the Applied Amount, maybe the gift amount from the gift record, maybe the appeal if you're using them, campaigns and funds, etc.

 

OMG! I just noticed this had a reply. James, thank you for your response. We actually want to be able to review simple things like, how many memberships are currently active that have a gift attached, how many are comps, and both should be current ytd and last ytd. I couldn't for the life of me figure out the dilema of constituent or membership exports because you are right membership is limiting but then constituent was just overwhelming in information. I was trying to generate the crystal as a sub report to our current weekly report.



Please let me know if you have suggestions.

Cathleen Mai

Just to clarify. I assume you do have the membership Module?

 

Cheena DeAraujoDesir

Yes we have membership module

Elaine Tucker

Yes I have about 4 that I use and am currently writing one for a complete overview of membership which includes dues paid, drop ratio and member counts per category. What are you looking for?

Cheena DeAraujoDesir

We are trying to get a YTD summary of memberships for our weekly reports that lets us know how many joined, renewed/rejoined or upgraded. We also want to compare that against the number form the year before. Something like the bottom half of the attached report.