Donorology

 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...