help with a report

Jenna Graham:
Hello, We're preparing for an annual fund bootcamp, and I'm required to submit several spreadsheets of data. I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to do this in one or two reports, rather than dozens of individual reports. Does anyone have any suggestions on which reports to use? Here's what I need to pull: For FY 2011, 2012, and 2013 (separately) Total # of donors # of New/First Time donors # of retained donors # of donors upgraded Total $ pledged/committed Total $ pledged/fulfilled Total $ received This has to be organized by CONSTITUENCY CODE, and then divided between gifts that are over and under $1,000. I'm so lost I can't handle it. Please help me. I thought about pulling a new donor report, but then I would be doing it for each CC, and that doesn't help me with any of the other columns. Any suggestions?

Jenna, I do the exact same reporting that you do and every year it takes multiple (and I mean multiple) queries, reports and exports to get all the data I need to do a full analysis of the past FY compared to previous years. It takes a lot of patience, time and effort.

I had been doing this only annually and last year had to do the same reporting mid year and in Q3. When doing it only annually I lived with the amount of work it took and I would recommend that to others.

Because I may need to be doing this extensive analysis multiple times a year now, what I hope to do this year is work on developing custom crystal reports which can analyze the data and present it as I have been doing in excel. It will take me months (if not the whole year) to do becase it is extensive and takes so much time - but in the end I hope it will be worth the effort since it will be used (and hopefully only slightly tweaked) frequently moving forward.

To speak specifically to your new donors I would do a merge query instead. - take one query of all of your donors who gave this year and another query with all donors who had given anytime before this FY and sub the second from the first - this will give you your new donors. You can then export them or do a pivot report to get the information you need.

Jenna Graham:
Hello, We're preparing for an annual fund bootcamp, and I'm required to submit several spreadsheets of data. I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to do this in one or two reports, rather than dozens of individual reports. Does anyone have any suggestions on which reports to use? Here's what I need to pull: For FY 2011, 2012, and 2013 (separately) Total # of donors # of New/First Time donors # of retained donors # of donors upgraded Total $ pledged/committed Total $ pledged/fulfilled Total $ received This has to be organized by CONSTITUENCY CODE, and then divided between gifts that are over and under $1,000. I'm so lost I can't handle it. Please help me. I thought about pulling a new donor report, but then I would be doing it for each CC, and that doesn't help me with any of the other columns. Any suggestions?

I would also recommend Crystal Reports as a long term solution, although the sooner the better.  In the meantime, as others have mentioned, there isn't one canned report in RE that will give you all of this information and in the format you need it, so unfortunately it will be a manual process. If frequently get requests for reports like this (where you wind up doing multiple queries, exports, spreadsheets) then learning Crystal Reports training would be a great investment (or find someone to build the reports for you).