Donor Analysis questions

The Comparative Report in Analytical Reports can be helpful. I use it to help determine increased or decreased giving. I often export that report so I can delve into the information more thoroughly. 



I also export all of the data and slice and dice it too.. It is time consuming, but reports in RE can be limiting. At the end of the FY I find that exporting a spreadsheet of all of my donors is the way to go. I've been documenting my process over the last 2 years so it does get easier each time that I do it.

That's a list and a half and as Karen mentioned there are some RE reports that would help.  If you plan to only pull this information once a year then you might still be better off doing it with Excel (have you tried using macros or setting it up in a way that all you need to do is switch out the old data with new, instead of recreating the entire workbook and formulas?) or...  Since I'm a huge fan of Crystal Reports I recommend creating custom reports if you have the skills/resources to do so.  Then you could easily run your analysis annually, monthly, weekly, daily.



-Josh



 

For us, the Comparative Report and the Donor Category Report have proved to be the most helpful. The Donor Category Report would show you the number of donors at various giving levels. We've also compared those across several years after exporting to Excel. The Comparative Report, as mentioned in a previous reply, is a quick way to look at increased or decreased giving. Both of these are under Analytical Reports. The Donor Category Report will also show total number of donors at the bottom. For lapsed donors, you could use the LYBUNT report, also under Analytical. We tend to turn to canned reports rather than manipulating an excel document as often as possible because it can cut out a lot of the manual work, and provides a nice snapshot. There are still several times where we use queries and exports to provide the information we need because canned reports can't cover everything.

I am a huge fan of Crystal Reports as well.  I use it for everything that I cannot get out from standard reports.  It takes time to set it up but once you have the template, you can include this as one of your custom reports to run on a regular basis. Not sure if you can set up all your reports in one page but sub-reports may help if you only looking at summaries.  Blackbaud has a great support for Crystal report writing.

I'm relatively new to Raiser's Edge and I knew about LYBUNT/SYBUNT but I hadn't heard of the Statistical Report. Off to explore! Thank you to Susan and everyone else who replied.



Laura