Analytics & Reporting in Luminate Online

Laura Murray 2

We are discussing a move from BBNC to LO and wanted to find out how the reporting on analytics works in Luminate Online. I know we can get information if we drill down to the campaign/event level, but can you report on LO analytics from a constituent level? Can you do it in RE or does it have to be done in LO?

Brian Mucha

The new rewrite of Luminate is supposed to be making a lot more data visible in an infographic/Tableau kind of way. Seems like it's still a ways off. 


Report Writer is a report builder that allows you to get quite a bit of data out of LO and into Excel, which is how I would usually do this sort of thing. Lots of people dump those reports into something like Tableau too.


So you could easily pull all the transactions for a particular user, or to a whole campaign. You pick the fields you want to see.


Once in a while, I can't get everything I want in a single report and have to do a little combining in Excel with lookups between two reports, but that isn't too frequent.


It's not all pretty on screen, but I can't remember a time that I couldn't get data out of LO and into Excel with a little effort. 


If you are syncing to RE, then you can do a ton there too. But LO does have its own systems for reporting. Some data probably won't be syncing to RE that you will be interested in, too.

Laura Murray 2

Thank you, Brian. That helps a lot. We are frequently asked about particular users open/click rates-- or the open/click rates of certain email campaigns sent in a specific time period. This has been difficult to pull out of BBNC. Glad to hear that you can get it out of LO-- and we do use Tableau to create infographics. I'm glad to hear that it is (maybe) coming to LO soon. Thanks again for your input.

Brian Mucha

There are 10 'engagement factor' fields on each constituent. And you can set a recurring task process to populate these fields with counters for a range of interactions, including email clicks, over the last XX days. 


So we are using three: for email received in the last 90 days, email opened in the last 90, and clicks in the last 90 days. You can then use these values for automatic segmentation or reporting. (We suppress anyone that hasn't opened an email in 90 days.)


You can also look directly on a cons record and see if they the received or opened any particular email send. Handy when someone claims they never get our emails. (Hmm, they opened one on Feb 22nd.)

Dale Anania

We are not happy with LO reporting and are considering buying something like Tableau. First, LO is VERY confusing for all of us;  the average user should be able to write their own reports, which most are able to do in Raiser's Edge. So something to keep in mind. Second, there are just a lot of things we can't figure out how to query on—maybe it's us, but in many cases, it doesn't allow you to. We've had to hire a firm to write some of the reports. We find Engagement Factors very challenging to use, and so did our vendor. Yet as Brian Mucha says, they could be very powerful. And we'd like to see more than 10 factors.

 

Erik Leaver

The reports in Luminate Beta are very visual and may serve some of your needs. I also find the Lists tool in Beta to be easier to use than the query tool. Between these two features, some of your pain points may be resolved. 


You might find the Learn Basics classes to be helpful:

We also have a recording of a Luminate Tips & Timesavers session on Engagement Factors that might help to demystify them for you!

• Engagement Factors: Best Practices for Segmenting to Drive Engagement May 2017

Best,

Erik

Laura Murray 2

Is there a way to set an engagement factor based on a constituent's engagmenet with our social media channels? Can Attentive.ly data come into Luminate to assist with any of these engagement rankings?

Brian Mucha

> Is there a way to set an engagement factor based on a constituent's engagmenet with our social media channels?


I don't think so. Your options are any combination of E-mails Received, E-mail Opens, E-mail Click-throughs, Forwarded e-mails, E-mails Sent.


> Can Attentive.ly data come into Luminate to assist with any of these engagement rankings?


As far as I know you can only use Attentive.ly to create groups in Luminate. (We only had it for a short time.) However, within Attentive.ly you get a lot of tracking, ranking and reporting,


But those groups could be useful too. You could segment your list by Social Influencer Score, etc.

 

Brian Mucha

Dale Anania:

We are not happy with LO reporting and are considering buying something like Tableau. First, LO is VERY confusing for all of us;  the average user should be able to write their own reports, which most are able to do in Raiser's Edge. So something to keep in mind. Second, there are just a lot of things we can't figure out how to query on—maybe it's us, but in many cases, it doesn't allow you to. We've had to hire a firm to write some of the reports. We find Engagement Factors very challenging to use, and so did our vendor. Yet as Brian Mucha says, they could be very powerful. And we'd like to see more than 10 factors.

All true enough. Beta is hopefully going to address some of that usability.


Sometimes you have to run a report and check some of the results to figure out just what a field is showing. I think a lot of that is due to the different components that make up Luminate, many of which have been purchased and shoehorned into the product.


Nothing will give you access to every data point. So sometimes it's a report writer CSV or two, merged together with a Mail Merge or whatever to get everything you want. That's not too common for us, though. I've even pulled data from the API console a few times.