Acquisition/Rejoins for Metrics - what's best report?

Amy Stubbings

Hi all, my GOs are getting metrics for a certain number of renewed donors who lapsed previously. (For example, "renew giving from 20 prior donors that didn't give last year in X fund").  What's the best way to determine our past performance to give them a good metric for 2017?  


I used a query to get a number, but it's not capturing SYBUNTS and I don't feel like messing around if the community has a better idea.  I have NXT as well, but I don't trust their acquisition numbers right now. There's a glitch (for 2017 it says we acquired 4 donors- true- but has acq. rate of 0% and revenue added of $0, neither of which can be right.)


How would you all figure this out? Thank you!

Ryan Hyde

This question seems a bit tricky and very specific to your org's system. 


It does seem like you should be able to put together a query with several "summary total number of gift" fields in the criteria. 


- Total number of gifts in range 1 >0 (this looks for historical giving, so you're trying to find people who have had a tendency to give)

- Total number of gifts in range 2 = 0 (this looks for the period that defines a "lapsed" donor as of a certain date. You'll need to define when a donor would have been considered lapsed for a given reporting period)

- Total number of gifts in range 3 > 0 (this looks for donors who seem to have responded to your GOs' work in a given time period)


For each summary, you need to make sure you define what constitues a gift (you mentioned a specific fund, but you'll probably also want to look for certain gift types, and I always throw in a "gift amount > $0" criteria to ensure I don't see writeoffs or reversals). 


Does this make sense? Does it seem like it's on the right track? I do a large scale report every year that uses 3 queries that are basically like this to feed into a "coverage ratio" metric. 

Dale Anania

Ryan Hyde:

This question seems a bit tricky and very specific to your org's system. 


It does seem like you should be able to put together a query with several "summary total number of gift" fields in the criteria. 


- Total number of gifts in range 1 >0 (this looks for historical giving, so you're trying to find people who have had a tendency to give)

- Total number of gifts in range 2 = 0 (this looks for the period that defines a "lapsed" donor as of a certain date. You'll need to define when a donor would have been considered lapsed for a given reporting period)

- Total number of gifts in range 3 > 0 (this looks for donors who seem to have responded to your GOs' work in a given time period)


For each summary, you need to make sure you define what constitues a gift (you mentioned a specific fund, but you'll probably also want to look for certain gift types, and I always throw in a "gift amount > $0" criteria to ensure I don't see writeoffs or reversals). 


Does this make sense? Does it seem like it's on the right track? I do a large scale report every year that uses 3 queries that are basically like this to feed into a "coverage ratio" metric. 

Ryan, tell me more about your large scale report that uses three queries. Is this an excel doc you put together from data derived from those 3 queries?