Showing multiple gifts in report?

Nicole Holt

A part of our acknowledgement process includes circulating gift records (copies of checks or notices of online giving) to a select group of staff in our Development department, along with our executive director. We use these copies to note any pertinent information about the gift or donor before the acknowledgement is printed, and often decisions about what letter & who writes it is decided through this method. We've found that it works well for our office, except for the online gifts. We have been using an export/mail merge to create reports on these "paperless" gifts but it is cumbersome--especially in November/December, when our volume spikes.


I would like to move to a Crystal Report--which I have just about configured. The issue I am now facing is that (since this is generated in RE), my director would like to have giving history inlcuded on the report. I've tried including a second gift section in the export, including 5 gifts sorted in descending order by date (I have to say that I'm not sure that gives me the most recent 5 gifts anyway, but that is another problem). However, when I export this to a database file, only one gift comes through. I was wondering if there is a way to export multiple historic gifts in Crystal Reports, or if this is just not possible in the tool.


I could export summary information by fiscal year, but it sounds like that is not what my director wants: she wants the specific dates/amounts to identify patterns. Any suggestions?

Lauren Schler CFRE bCREPro

Hi Nicole,

 

If you have access to phone support for RE, I recommend talking
with Crystal Report support team about this. Their specialists, Ron
and Stacie, have helped me tweak my Crystal reports many times to
include exactly what I need to see.

 

I hope this helps.

 

Best,

 

Lauren

 

Chester Bammel

Is the date field included on your
export?  You have to have something that makes each record
unique.

 

If it is, then I don’t know.  I am a
Crystal Reports expert, but not as it relates to RE.  I have
never worked before with a system that required to make an export
and then report from that.  I’m used to reporting directly off
the database.

 

Chester

 

 

Chester Bammel

Business
Analyst

IT Enterprise
Services

Division of
Information Technology

Sam
Houston State University

Box
2397 Huntsville, TX  77341

Office - (936) 294-2351

 

 

Zane Magnuson 2

One thought that comes to mind would be double-checking the "Criteria" for all of the fields in your Export. Just make sure that you're not filtering based on year or a year-specific appeal for the historic gifts. If you're unable to Export a separate set of gifts (historic vs current), you'll need to Export everything that you want and then build the filters to separate the historic gifts from the current gifts within the Crystal Report itself.

Nicole Holt

We don't have phone support with Blackbaud, which would be wonderful. 


Date fields are included, but it looks like the database export only includes the gift in the pull. I'm new to Crystal Reports, but I'm guessing that what I'm looking to do isn't possible. Really all I want is


gift date   gift amount   reference
gift date   gift amount   reference

(and so on)


but the export item is all going into the "CnGf_2" field grouping (which includes CnGf_2_Date, CnGf_2_Amount, CnGf_2_Reference, etc,but I don't know how Crystal would know that there is more than one value to report since there is only the one group. Or maybe since I'm trying to figure this out on my own I'm missing something..which is sadly very likely.

Katie Cagney

Hi Nicole,


Have you tried exporting the same field five times, rather than including five gifts in one field?

This would mean clicking the gift section five times, and each time exporting only one gift

https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/41839 


Don't know if that helps but thought I'd bring it up.


Katie

Alan French

If you export the same field multiple times, how would you ensure that you don't export the same gift each time? Each constituent will have given their gifts during different date ranges.


In this case I think it would be easier to export all the gifts in the same table, and then get Crystal to suppress the details section from the 6th record onwards.

Marie Stark

What you are trying to do should work. I have a report that shows each gift.

It sounds like you said you have a grouping for gifts?  I think that is your problem. Your gift information should be in the detail section.

If you have it in a group header or footer, it will only show one gift.

 

Alan French

If you put the gift fields in the details section as Marie suggested, then group on constituent ID, you can create something like this:




The constituent info (i.e. name) is in the group header and the gift fields are underneath in the details section.




I've created a formula called giftcount:
whileprintingrecords;

global Numbervar GiftCount := GiftCount + 1


which sits in the details section and increases by 1 with each new record. I've then created another formula called resetgiftcount which sits in the group header and resets giftcount back to zero every time the group (constituent) changes:
whileprintingrecords;

numbervar GiftCount := 0;


Then you just need to go into the Section Expert and add a suppression formula to the details section to hide all but the 5 most recent gifts:
@{@giftcount} > 5

Nicole Holt

Thank you so much! I feel like I was right...I didn't know what I didn't know. I'll get to work with these solutions and hopefull report my success back later in the day. 


This community is fantastic!

Nicole Holt

Oh my word. This works beautifully---and I learned a lot in the process. Thank you so much, Alan!

Lauren Schler CFRE bCREPro

Hi Nicole,

 

This is kind of reporting is very possible in Crystal!

 

Regarding adding phone support to your account - I investigated how
much it would cost to add phone support to one of my clients
accounts and it was very reasonable. I strongly encourage you to
look into that. The two Crystal trainings that Blackbaud offers are
excellent but they barely scrap the surface of the program’s
abilities. I view the Crystal support line as an extension of my
training in Crystal and well worth the investment.

 

Good luck!

 

Best,

 

Lauren