Donorology

 Hey you guys! A common topic when it comes to breaking down fundraising success in Raiser's Edge  is how to do it by funds.   There are several solutions inside and outside the database. It is my strong, personal preference that top level data analysis always be done outside the database. There is so much more flexibility, you learn more about your data, and you have more confidence in your reporting. Check out this quick video where I show the limits of Standard Reports and how quickly you can make something more robust in Tableau.   Have a suggestion for a topic?  Let me know. Yours in Data, -Dave

 Hey you guys! It’s not a big secret that one of the more controversial features for many long year in Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge is the split gift feature. On one hand it offers a great way to divide a single contribution into multiple funds, campaigns, or appeals. On the other hand it makes analysis somewhat difficult.  Many institutions simply don’t use split gifts at all and would enter a single check or credit card gift as multiple gifts in the batch. One of the things that makes analyzing split gifts difficult is the lack of a split gift ID in the Query and Export modules. While it is technically possible to get the split gift ID from the administrator import function, there’s another way that you can create a unique ID for each split gift segment.   In this demo , I show example examples using Excel and tableau how this can be quickly accomplished.  What do you think? What are some of the other issues working with split gifts    in Raiser’s Edge!...

 Hey you guys! Tableau is not great just for crunching numbers, it can help visualize ordinary data in a map. One common geographic related task that happens for American nonprofits every year is reporting in which states they had donors.  This is pretty simple to do with just a couple of data fields for each gift: Gift ID Donor ID Gift Amount City (and country if you can't filter on that) Gift Date (use more than one year, it's fun!) You can do this in Excel and literally 30 seconds, using a pivot table. But with tableau, you can make it a little more interesting by visually showing if each state is gaining or losing donors over the previous year. Check out the tutorial here . Next time - split gift data! ( I know I have said this before) Yours in Data -Dave

 Hey you guys! A very simple  question popped up in the Facebook Raiser's Edge Support Group a few days ago.  What about comparing partial years from reports?  This is a bit of a problem using built in tools, but a third party BI application or Excel can do this in seconds.  Excel is fine, but you can do even more with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Public.   Check it out here . Thoughts or suggestions? Yours in Data, -Dave

 Hey you guys! Just a few quick takeaways from the Raiser's Edge Product Update Briefing last week... Overall, I commend Blackbaud for finally articulating its clear vision for its flagship product. I believe that nonprofits new to Blackbaud will find a wealth of valuable resources. However, long-standing customers may not be as pleased with the new bold direction.   The total RE web view solution is not for long time Blackbaud customers. Blackbaud hopes they come along for the ride, but it clearly wasn’t made for them      While Blackbaud will offer an array of products, as far as extending the abilities of RE goes, this will largely be up to third-party services Blackbaud offers many tools to extend the abilities of RE (some might argue not enough) but it demands end users pick up skills they didn’t have during the classic era Almost no mention of Insights Designer. This is interesting given how Blackbaud has shackled the product with very limited fields and n...

 Hey you guys! A very common topic on the Facebook Raiser's Edge Support group is "how can analyze giving between more than two years, without having to run multiple reports?"  I must maintain some hope that eventually Blackbaud will dramatically beef-up the built-in reporting abilities of RE, but for now there are third-party options.   I've been doing multiple year analysis of donors for a decade now in Tableau.  There are some very quick methods to tackle this issue.  You only need four fields to do a considerable amount of analysis: Gift ID Constituent ID Gift Amount Gift Date It will take FAR less time to export these as Gift Records rather than Constituent Records with summaries.  With ALL gift records, you can analyze your data and trends at any scale (three years, five years, ten years, etc.). Here's the simple version . A much more thorough take on deep retention and KPI metrics can be found on YouTube by Concourse Hosting.   They do some real...

Hey you guys! Here's a question posted to the Facebook RE support group last week (but I've seen it many times): "How can I compare my donor age demographics to what they were 10 years ago?"   RE isn't exactly built to answer that question. With a couple of calculated fields in Tableau, you can quickly visualize this comparison from a simple RE export.  Check it out here .   What do you think?  Comments are welcome! Next time, I'll discuss ways to display the dates of donors' first gifts and perform some quick data analysis. I will also do it in a fraction of the time it would have taken to export this from RE as a summary field. Yours in Data -Dave

 Hey you guys! Last Spring, I did a five-part series on making a simple data warehouse for use with your choice of business intelligence programs. Forgive the audio and video quality. My interest is in getting the content into the hands of people who need it, so  I tend to skimp on the polish. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Enjoy! Yours in Data, -Dave

Hey you guys! (in my best Electric Company yell) Here's my first video for the YouTube channel.  I think the most common question I see on the Facebook Raiser's Edge support group is "How can I get a list of constituents and how many years they gave during any given number of years?"  You can use many tools to answer this question, but I love being able to take a data set and just dive into it with Tableau. Nothing else really compares for me.  This solution works with any donor data system, by the way.  Check it out here . Yours in data -Dave

 I prefer to do videos but on those rare occasions I like to write you can find my attempts here. Most of my content will end up on the YouTube channel .   Why Tableau?  Because it’s clean and I think most non-techie people will find it a bit less bewildering than the alternatives. Tableau Public is free and now allows for saving files to local storage. You still have to sign up for an account, but other than that you can save files locally if you desire.  It does just about everything you could want in a free product.  I hope to show a number of techniques for things like retention, donor growth, cost per dollar raised, ROI, conversion, lifetime value, and more.  Yours in data, -Dave