Why do TeamRaiser and Donation Reports give different reports?

Esther Pomeleo-Fowler

This document focuses particularly on the differences in reporting between the TeamRaiser Reports and the Donation Campaign Reports.

TeamRaiser Reports can be found in Data Management > Reports > TeamRaiser Reports.

Donation Campaign Reports can be found in Fundraising > Online Giving > Donation Reports.

The first place to check for an answer on what each report does and what it includes is the Convio Help, found by clicking the "Help" link in the top right. The help also contains information on how to configure the reports to obtain the data you want. If you have not read the help for the reports you have questions about yet, please do so prior to continuing with this solution.

To understand how these reports work, it is key to think about the underlying Data Model of how information related to Donation Forms and TeamRaiser Gifts are stored.

Each TeamRaiser Event can only be associated to a single Donation Campaign / Form at a time. The Donation Campaign / Form has no such restrictions on it. You can create a single Donation Campaign with a Single Donation Form and link as many TeamRaisers to that single Donation Campaign/Form as you want.

In the backend of Convio, all transactions are stored in one database table, while the details of a TeamRaiser gift are stored in a different table. Each TeamRaiser Gift does link to an entry in the Transaction table. Donation Reports look at the Transaction Table based of the Donation Campaign/Form information, while TeamRaiser reports look at the TeamRaiser Gifts table based off the information on which TeamRaiser you want to report on.

For Example: you have 2 TeamRaiser events that share the same donation form (Form 1). Event A raised $40,000 online. Event B raised $10,000 online. When you run reports, you would see totals like this:

TeamRaiser Reports

• Event A: $40,000

• Event B: $10,000

Donation Reports

• Form 1: $50,000

All of which is entirely accurate based off the way data is stored between the transactions table and the TeamRaiser Gifts table.

Now let's make this a little more complicated: You edit a PageBuilder Page, go to the Links drop down and chose Donation Form, then select "Form 1".

People visit that page, follow that link, and go directly to the donation form. By doing this, you raise $20,000 online, all of which went through that form, but none of it went through either of the TeamRaiser Events.

Now your reports show these numbers:

TeamRaiser Reports

• Event A: $40,000

• Event B: $10,000

Donation Reports

• Form 1: $70,000

Time to complicate matters again: Create a new Donation Form (Form2). Edit Event A and change it to use Form2 instead of Form1. With another push from your participants, EventA raises another $60,000.

The reports will now look like this:

TeamRaiser Reports

• Event A: $100,000

• Event B: $10,000

Donation Reports

• Form 1: $70,000

• Form 2: $60,000

Final round of complications in the setup: Create a new TeamRaiser Event (EventC) where in order to participate, constituents must pay a $10 registration fee. EventC is linked to a new donation form (Form3). 100 People Register for EventC and raise a total of $10,000 (all online, no offline gifts).

Reports now look like this:

TeamRaiser Reports

• Event A: $100,000

• Event B: $10,000

• EventC: $11,000

Donation Reports

• Form 1: $70,000

• Form 2: $60,000

• Form 3: $10,000

Why is there a $1,000 difference between Event C and Form 3, if Form 3 is only used by Event C? Because the Reports for Donation Campaigns only look for transactions that are Donations, meaning they do not include Registration fees (or Event Ticket Sales through the Calendar application, FYI).

The key part to that is "Reports for Donation Campaigns" - this means that the Donation by Transaction report will thus only show transactions that are donations. Donation Campaign Forms do not allow for the entry of Offline Transactions directly.

However, TeamRaiser does allow for the entry of offline gifts, even when linked to a Donation Campaign, and these gifts are linked directly to the TeamRaiser, so they will show up on the TeamRaiser reports, but not on the Donation Campaign Reports. So, if you were to have $5,000 of offline gifts entered for each of our 3 TeamRaiser Campaigns, the reports would now look like this:

• Event A: $105,000

• Event B: $15,000

• EventC: $16,000

Donation Reports

• Form 1: $70,000

• Form 2: $60,000

• Form 3: $10,000

What if you want to see ALL transactions, online and offline, registration fees and donations? For this, you'll want the Transaction Report. This is different than the Donations by Transaction Report, which is a Donations Campagin Report and will thus only look at donations made online. The "Transaction Report" can be found in Data Management > Reports, and has a link to it in these Folders on that screen: Transaction Reports, Event Reports, and TeamRaiser Reports (the report is the same regardless of which folder you open to get to it).

When you run this and download the results, there are columns such as "Form_of_Payment" which identifies if this was Cash, Check, or Credit Card. The column "Donation_On_Behalf_Of" tells you who this gift was made on behalf of, and will have the name of the TeamRaiser Participant, Team, or Event for TeamRaiser gifts; the name of the Tribute Fund for Tribute Campaign Gifts, or "No Proxy" for cases where the donation was made directly through the donation form without going through TeamRaiser or Tributes to get to the donation form (ie, they followed the link from a PageBuilder Page).

This report can be very helpful since it allows you to download the report, sort it by the various columns, then slice the data however you'd like to obtain the results based off whatever criteria you would like.

So - Putting it all together and running the Transaction Report as well, we would see these results in our Reports, with explanations in parentheses:

TeamRaiser Reports:

• Event A: $105,000 ($40k through Form1, $60k through Form2, $5k offline)

• Event B: $15,000 ($10k through Form1, $5k offline)

• EventC: $16,000 ($10k through Form3, $1k registration fees, $5k offline)

Donation Reports

• Form 1: $70,000 ($40k to EventA, $10k to EventB, $20k No Proxy )

• Form 2: $60,000 ($60k to EventA)

• Form 3: $10,000 ($10k to EventC)

Transaction Report:

• Total: $155,000 ($70k from Form1 + $60k from Form2 + $10k from Form3 + $15k offline; columns to identify which Event / participant / team / tribute the gift was made on behalf of)

A common question we receive is "Why are the reports like this?" The reports work like this because it allows for organizations to set up "themes" or "goals" from an organizational standpoint.

The idea being that you, as an organization, have the goal of building say... a Treehouse. You create a Donation Campaign called "Treehouse Campaign". You set the Campaign Goal to whatever the estimated cost of building the Treehouse will be. You create a Form in there to use for a General Donation Campaign that you will send an email solicitation for, another form to use for TeamRaiser events, and another form to use for Tribute Campaigns. You then create a TeamRaiser Event for a 5k run to help raise money for the Treehouse. You start up a Tributes Campaign so that people can fundraise in tribute to a loved one, and you will perhaps name rooms in the Treehouse after the Tributees. You send out your email blast to everyone and put links to the General Donation Form on your website. The efforts of all 3 initiatives to raise money for that 1 common goal can be tracked independently via the TeamRaiser Reports, Tributes Reports, and Donation by Form Reports, and the initiative itself has just a single thermometer for the campaign's performance (counting efforts of all 3 initiatives) and the Donation by Campaign report will show you how your online efforts are doing (but not your offline gifts because Donation Campaigns are only for use online).