Parent Class Analysis Report

Patti Hommes, bCRE-PRO

This one is for my K-12 friends out there. Having used RE in a healthcare environment for 12 years, I am just now delving into Alumni and Parent Class Analysis reports. My first stab was running a report for all parent giving for classes 2015 - 2028, and my results are completely wrong! I re-checked my filters over and over and don't see anything wrong there, and I chose "attribute to child graduating first" which, the way I look at it, would be 2015.  My results give me three parents (families) of the class of 2015 who gave in FY15, when I know there are 87. Help!

Carolyn Moatz

Have you tried including students who have left? I was having the same issue, and that worked for me. We remove primary alumni information from student who actually leave, so that isn't an issue for us.

Marla Hager

We use these for end of year info, and give parents full credit in each class they have a student. We found to get the best results, we use a "parent class of" query which selects parents based on which year you're running, filters to include all years 15-28. For best results, we run each year separately, so we get an accurate number within each year, as well as an overall that is attributed to oldest child. Also, if you soft credit, make sure you check those settings, as they did some wonky things for us on other settings.

Leilani McHugh

Are your Class of 2015 parents still coded as Current Parents or are they now coded as Parents of Alumni?  And you also might check how the children are coded in relationship to their parents.   In our database, we differentiate between child and step-child in the relationships between parent and student.  These questions are necessary to ask as they could affect the filters you've chosen on that filters tab.  

Patti Hommes, bCRE-PRO

They are still coded as Current Parent (we didn't want to change them until end of FY reports were done), and I have the child codes selected correctly. I'll try the other suggestions as well and let you know. Thanks all!

Christine Cooke 2

Because the reporting by class year has been a main report, and a pain at every school, I learned to bring the filter up another level so that I don't have to worry about whether I have the parent/child relationship and all of it's variations included.  I learned to add a Gift Attribute on every gift and pledge payment from parents on any gift they give. 

Then I can pull the reports based on that.  Since the year is over, it would be easy enough to globally add that to all the gifts that it applies to.

Also - as mentioned, it is to your benefit to pull the classes individually as well as in a comprehensive/all inclusive report.

BTW, which report are you using?  Just an Export?  or a canned report?  You can build something in Demographic and Statistical reports, if you haven't already, that filters on parent, year, fund etc.

Sharon Campbell

I do it much like Marla's process, creating a query of parents of class of, then running the report by class of. Soft credit goes to donor.  My biggest issue is that for students with divorced parents, we want to count that child's family as having given even if just one of the divorced parents gave; for this I have to know who those divorced families are.  Starting out this fiscal year, I will add an attribute something like "split family" so I can identify them.

Patti Hommes, bCRE-PRO

Sharon, we added a relationship type of Divorced/Separated Spouse. They aren't linked as spouse but we can use the relationship type to report on.

 

Graham Getty

I've also done work for organizations who wanted the parent class analysis report to be student-based. That is, when it came to divorced families, as long as one parent of the child gave, then as far as the school was concerned, they had achieved participation based on a gift from that student's family. Basically they wanted to treat divorced parent households the same as married parent households without having to give soft-credit. I came up with a variety of workarounds, but here's a screencast that shows how to do it for anyone who is interested: http://resolvedllc.com/parent-analysis/


Hi, Marla!

Jimi Conners

Carolyn Moatz:

Have you tried including students who have left? I was having the same issue, and that worked for me. We remove primary alumni information from student who actually leave, so that isn't an issue for us.

We are trying to include students who have left, but can't seem to make that work. It seems that their "Date left" is what is omitting them from the list. Do you know how I would make sure these students are still included? For example, we just had a family with two students leave. One of them graduated and the other was a bit younger. So, one gets a graduated date and other gets a date they left. The parents show up in the class list for the graduated child, but not the list for the other child.