Reporting: List Activity Reports

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Kevin Suer
Kevin Suer ✭
Ancient Membership Facilitator 1
in Releases : Winter 2010

Feature Summary

Release: Winter '10

Author: Kevin Suer

 

Overview:

The Winter 2010 release provides four new Report Writer report models that enable you to review your overall list size and activity trends in Convio.

 

Key Features:

  • New Report Writer report type:  Four new reports are available in a new type of Report Writer report called “List Activity.”  See the FAQ section of this document for a full listing of metrics available in each of these new report.
    • Site Activity by Time: Provides data on changes in overall Constituent 360 list size, including context information on how contacts are being added or removed from your list.
    • Center Activity by Time: Provides data on changes to list size within selected Centers over time.
    • Group Activity by Time: Provides data on changes to list size within selected Groups over time.
    • Interest Activity by Time: Provides data on changes to list size within selected Interest over time.
  • Dynamic Aggregation: A new feature in these reports will dynamically pivot and aggregate your Report Writer data based on the columns you select.  For example, if you choose to include “Month” as a column in these reports, then your list activity statistics will automatically roll up by month;if you choose to include days in these reports, your list activity statistics will automatically roll up by day.  See the FAQ section for details on how Dynamic Aggregation works in Report Writer.

 

Screen Captures:

 

ListRpt1.jpg

 

Figure 1: Four new List Activity reports available from Step 1 of defining a report in Report Writer.

 

ListRpt2.jpg

 

Figure 2: Hundreds of metrics to choose from on how your overall list is growing or shrinking over time.

 

Limitations and Out of Scope Features:

The following related features were not included in the Winter 2010 product release and will be considered for inclusion in a future release.

  • Context information for Centers and Groups: No context information is provided for how constituents are added to or removed from Centers or Groups ( such as, added through Tell-A-Friend, or Removed through Data Sync, etc.). The Center and Group reports only provide change in list size over the selected time period.
  • Churn Metrics: No standard churn metrics are included in these reports.  (Churn is the rate at which contact records “go bad” in a given period of time.)
  • No historical data will provided in these four new reports.  When the Winter 2010 release is deployed on your site, a brand new data structure will be created behind-the-scene to begin logging the data for these reports.  Reporting administrators using these reports will not be able to see list activity for periods before the upgrade to the Winter 2010 release.

 

Site Data Parameters:

There were no Site Data Parameters added as part of this project.

 

Client Impacts:

  • All four List Activity reports will be available to all clients at no additional product licensing fee.

 

FAQ:

How many different fields are available in these new reports?

These reports have many fields.  Below is a count of metrics, or total columns, available for each report.

- Site by Time report: 211 metrics

- Center by Time: 22 metrics

- Group by Time: 25 metrics

- Interest by Time: 111 metrics

 

I don’t understand how dynamic aggregation works; what happens if I include multiple dynamic aggregation fields in a single report?

As a general rule of thumb, any non-numeric field type will have dynamic aggregation.  For List Activity reports this means that all fields of the following types will provide dynamic aggregation if you include them in the report:

- Date of List Activity

- Interests

- Groups

- Center Information

 

The following fields will be the statistics dynamically aggregated in these reports, but will not be the dimensions by which aggregation occurs.

- Changes to List Size

 

To understand the behavior of these reports better, let’s examine a simple example.  Let’s say we’re using the “Site by Time” report and let’s assume we have the following underlying data in Constituent360™.

- January 1, 2010 = 1 add

- January 15, 2010 = 3 adds

- January 22, 2010 = 10 adds

- February 3, 2010 = 7 adds

- February 15, 2010 = 22 adds

 

Scenario 1: By Month

If we include the following columns in the report:

- Month (from ‘Date of List Activity’ field grouping)

- Added to Site (from ‘Changes to List Size’ field grouping)

 

the ‘Month’ field is the only dynamically aggregated column in the report, so the report will automatically aggregate by that column -- in other words, by Month.  The report result will have the following two rows:

1. January = 14 adds

2. February = 29 adds

 

Scenario 2: By Date

If we include the following columns in the report:

- Date (from ‘Date of List Activity’ field grouping)

- Added to Site (from ‘Changes to List Size’ field grouping)

 

the ‘Month’ field is the only dynamically aggregated column in the report, so the report will automatically aggregate y that column, in other words, by Month.  The report result will have the following five rows:

1. January 1 = 1 add

2. January 15 = 3 adds

3. January 22 = 10 adds

4. February 3 = 7 adds

5. February 15 = 22 adds

 

Scenario 3: By Year

If we include the following columns in the report:

- Year (from ‘Date of List Activity’ field grouping)

- Added to Site (from ‘Changes to List Size’ field grouping)

 

the ‘Month’ field is the only dynamically aggregated column in the report, so the report will automatically aggregate by that column, in other words, by Month.  The report result will have the following one row:

1. 2010 = 43 adds

 

Scenario 4: By Center and Month

Let’s assume the same data as above, but that we are running a Center report and that, in addition to month, we include Center Administrative Name in the report.  If we include the following columns in the report we will have two dynamic aggregation fields (‘Center Administrative Name’ and ‘Month’):

- Month (from ‘Date of List Activity’ field grouping)

- Center Administrative Name (from ‘Center Information’ field grouping)

- Added to Site (from ‘Changes to List Size’ field grouping)

 

The report will automatically aggregate by the unique combination of all dynamic aggregation fields; hence, the unique combination of Month and Center.  The report result will have four rows:

1. Center A, January = 10 adds

2. Center B, January = 4 adds

3. Center A, February = 19 adds

4. Center B, February = 10 adds

 

What are the fields available in each report and for each metric, and which fields provide automatic dynamic aggregation when used in a report?

The table in the attached text file contains a comprehensive listing of all of the new fields available in each of the four new List Activity reports, including a notation of fields that are dynamic aggregation fields.

 

 

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