Dashboards and soft credits

Tracy Forkin

Has anyone figured a way to use a dashboard to report the following:

• Solicitor active assignments (prospect assigned to the gift officer through the relationship tab / assigned solicitor.
• Last gift amount, date, type.
  • Need to pull any soft credits in the category,also.

The trouble I am having is reflecting gifts for donors who are assigned but may give through a trust, foundation, etc. So, I need reflect the soft credit in the dashboard. Can this be done?


Tracy

Gina Gerhard

As a dashboard I don't think you can get what you want.


But you can create an export showing constituents with solicitors, and then their last gift data (including soft credit info).

And then add that Export to your Home page for easy access.


What I don't think you can do however is show ONLY soft credits related to trust/foundations and not show pousal soft credits. It's all or nothing.

• We've been asking Blackbaud for umpty-zillion years now to give us the ability to code the type of soft credit but have never made any headway.

Tracy Forkin

I thought I saw something about soft credits in an upcoming update for RE. I cannot remember the version but it did seem a while out.


Fingers crossed!

Ryan Hyde

IF you are okay seeing spousal soft credits (as Gina pointed out, there's no way to differentiate), you can set this up in a dashboard by adding a "solicitor query" panel.


The "solicitor query" panel is a little misleading as it can actually be tied to any constituent query, regardless of whether or not solicitor information is asked for within the query. This is an important distinction for anyone who wants to pipe in non standard constituent level info into a dashboard. 


But you can set up a constituent query that looks for the particular set of solicitor relationships you're curious about and that includes output for last gift date and amount, etc. You just have to make sure that within the query itself you go to Tools > Query Options > Gift Processing and adjust the soft credit settings to whatever you see fit (probably "both / use amount in grid"). 


So long as you're not including any information in the output that could potentially show up multiple times in one constituent record, like constituent code, you should have a tidy list with the info you want with no duplication errors. For this reason, I would not include the actual solicitor relationship info in the output unless you know that you never have any cases where more than one solicitor is assigned to a person. 


But again, this is all moot if spousal soft credits are going to cause you problems.

Gina Gerhard

Ryan - That's great to know, I didn't think any of the dashboards could work from a constituent query. Will have to explore!

Ryan Hyde

Yeah, once I figured that out I set up all kinds of crazy dashboards. For instnace, I've got a dashboard that shows all of the contact info for every funeral home in our area, plus columns that tell us how many times we've called them or they've called us to ask (or offer) more honor/memorial donation forms. It all comes from a constituent query that looks for constituent code (funeral homes only ever have one code - "funeral home") and pipes out the contact info and action summary info. Fun stuff.

Chris Z

Indeed, what is on the Output of the Query will show up in the Dashboard panel.