Selecting and Reporting Gifts based on Appeal Attributes?

Tom Klimchak

Hi.. We use appeal attributes for lots of things which make a few canned reports easier to run, but now we're starting to design specific gift queries which are supposed to select certain gifts based on appeal attributes...


Annnnnnd... there is no Appeal Attribute tree in Gift queries.  There are PACKAGE attributes, there are FUND attributes... but not APPEAL attributes....  Anyone have any ideas?  I need to be able to sort and total by Appeal attributes (I would normally do this with a pivot table)...but I can't even select the appropriate gift records.


Did Blackbaud forgot to put this in?


(Note: It IS available in Export... but my department wants all these things in an RE dashboard, not an outside report)

Claudia Marmorowski

 

Ryan Hyde

I thought for half a second you could write an appeal query and pipe that into a gift query via Tools > Query Options > Record Processing, but it doesn't allow you to select anything but a gift query from within a gift query (which makes sense, but drat!)


Yeah, this seems . . . like a problem. 

Ryan Hyde

I HAVE AN IDEA!


Reports > Financial Reports > Gift Entry Validation


Tell it to output a gift query, and dial in the attribute information there. 


It's stupid, but it might just work!


(edit: looks like you're required to put in a description, so hopefully the attributes you want to use have description dropdown menus...)

Tom Klimchak

Hmm... I like the Gift Entry Validation method, but I technically have four different options (all in one attribute) to total by... .  I think I'd have to end up making 4 different gift queries.. which is not much different from just exporting out all the gifts I need and slicing and dicing in Excel... or Crystal or whatever.  


This has also spurred us all into talking about how we slice and dice things here.  


But, yeah, it sounds like this was a big oversight by Blackbaud... thanks for confirming!

Ryan Hyde

Sounds like this should go in the Idea bank. I'll let you do the honors, but post a followup when the idea is live and I'll certainly vote on it.

Tom Klimchak

Found it... Only a few votes and it's been there a while:  https://re7.ideas.aha.io/ideas/RE7-I-376​