Teamraiser Reporting in Report Writer is a Mess

Brian Mucha

So I'm working with the Teamraiser Performance By Event report, trying to come up with a simple event comparison.


I notice that this report often shows less than one gift per donor. Gifts/Unique Donors. Simple right?


Gifts = Number of gifts and additional gifts during registration

Unique Donors = Really unique TRANSACTORS. Anyone that paid a fee or made a gift. What good is this number?

Self Donors = Entered a Gift into their own page or paid a fee. Probably includes DSP. Useless.


So once again, I'm pulling a giagantic transaction report into SQL and reporting in a tool with more control because the Luminate summary reporting is undocumented, misleading, or just not useful.

Amy Dana

Oh dear. Do you import that info into another database (like RE) or in LO your CRM? We're making the switch to TR from Sphere so I'm hoping this gets resolved soon. What does Support say?

Brian Mucha

I'm pretty sure you can get gifts per donor in one of the other canned reports, but not on Performance By Event. I'm using this report, because you can run it on a whole bunch of TRs at once. I'm comparing 41 events. The other reports summarize a singe event.


I put in an idea (https://luminateonline.ideas.aha.io/ideas/LUM-I-793) to improve this.


And now that I'm noticing the slippery definition of 'donor' here, I wonder what those reports are actually showing. I bet its 'transactions per transactor' and lumping everything together.


If I'm really doing a deep dive into an event, I usually just pull a complete transaction and registration report for the event from Report Writer, dump it all into Excel and build a summary with PivotTables. You can really do quite a bit with just Excel, some basic formulas and Pivot Tables/Charts. And that way you really know what 'average gifts per donor' actually shows. (Or better yet, show median gifts per donor.)


I've also imported into SQL and used MS Reporting Services, which is like Crystal Reports. Tableau is also pretty cool to mess around with, but I'm not very familiar with it. Those are big projects, though. Getting back up to speed on all of that is hours for me.


Anyhow, aside from the complaining part which is fun, I'm putting it out there for the next person that can't figure out why the report numbers don't make sense. (Or for myself in a year or two when I've forgotten all this.)

 

Patti Posey

Amy Dana:

Oh dear. Do you import that info into another database (like RE) or in LO your CRM? We're making the switch to TR from Sphere so I'm hoping this gets resolved soon. What does Support say?

Hi Amy:


We switched to Luminate/TeamRaiser last year.  I strongly advise you to remove any duplicate emails you have in your database before they do the data integration.  We were unaware of the problem this would cause going forward.  People are trying to register using their email and someone elses name comes up because they shared the same email address in sphere on multiple registrations.  We are getting a lot of phone calls about this.  So now to fix this issue, I have to do a query in RE and remove any duplicate emails so it will update the records in Luminate and hopefully solve the problem

Another big issue we are having is merging records in RE since the integration.  Once they complete your integration, before you start to use teamraiser, run a query in RE using the alias Luminate ID = blank.  What happened with us is all the records went up to Luminate (125K), but over 50K did not sync backk to RE so these records are not connected.  This is why we are having problems merging records in RE because it can't find the record in Luminate.  This issue has been going on for a year now and I am not happy.  BBs solution was to push through the 50K records in to the connector and have me process them.  That means I have to individually review these records because our data in RE is not the same as in Luminate since these records were never linked and Luminate never received any changes made in RE.  Not happy about this at all.


I hope this helps and good luck!


Patti Posey

Stamford Hospital Foundation

Brian Mucha

"Not happy about this at all."


Have you gotten your CSM on this? It's their job to advocate for you with support. I've had to push pretty hard to get things done, but they will if you are persistent. Squeeky wheel...


You can set your system to allow duplicate email in Teamraiser registrations, but not elsewhere in Luminate. If your events are anything like ours, you'll need to. Parents want to use their email for their kid's secondary registrations, so it's duplicate email galore here. At least the 'forgot password' email deals with this now, it was a real problem a year or so ago.

Patti Posey

Hi Brian,


Yes I got my CSM on this.  He worked with support and that is the best they can do.  Believe me I have over and over tried.


We do have our system set for duplicate emails in teamraiser.  We have team captains who register their team, and families who register. Which is now creating another issue.  When a participant goes to register and uses their email address, someone elses name will pop up because they were registered with that email address.  And if you send them their user name and they go to log in but forgot their password, they send a request to reset, but they aren't getting the email because the systems doesn't have their email.  It's such a mess. 

My suggestions was to turn off multiple registrations!   LOL  Thanks


Patti Posey

Stamford Hospital Foundation