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Top 10 Raiser’s Edge® Reports
Overview
Good reporting. Simple reporting. Accurate reporting. It’s the dream of every
Development team. As your database colleagues, it’s certainly our dream for you!
Remember the sales demonstration of Raiser’s Edge? All those glorious standard reports,
over one hundred, and how beautiful they looked compared to your old system? Honestly,
how many are you using regularly? If you’re like most organizations we encounter, you
may not be using enough to even build your own “Top 10” list. However, before the guilt
and shame settle in, let’s take a look at the likely reasons:
Too many choices. With so many reports, where do you start? The sheer number of
reports can be overwhelming.
Bad numbers. Often, when you first run a report, the numbers you get may not be
the numbers you’re looking for. They may not be the right figures, or they might
simply be wrong.
Poor formatting. Perhaps you’re getting the information you need, but it’s buried in
the report and difficult to find.
In this document, we tackle the first issue, offering our insight on where to start your
exploration of Raiser’s Edge reports. These are the reports we find give the most number of
our clients the greatest benefit. Curious about the second and third points? Well, good
numbers rely on a solid foundation of clear and consistent coding (see our coding-related
Free Resources) and for more on formatting, see the section on Custom Reporting, below.
We hope you find this information useful and a good starting point for your own RE
reporting adventures!
Our Favorite
Our number one report, from the days of RE:DOS, and still going strong is the venerable:
Gift Detail and Summary Report (found under “Financial Reports”)
If you use only one report in Raiser’s Edge, make it this one. This versatile report can
answer many common reporting requests. In Detail format, list donor names by whatever
date range, financial code, constituent code, or gift type filter you choose. At the same
time, the report can produce summary totals by Campaign, Fund, Appeal and/or Constituent
Code. We also appreciate the many choices for additional output columns.
Reports that Give Constituent Details
Reports can be roughly divided into two types: those that provide record-by-record details
on constituents, and those that provide aggregated financial information. Here are our
favorites in the first category:
Donor Category Report (Analytical Reports)
Donor Category Report is great place to start when you need to produce recognition lists.
You decide what the giving categories will be and the date range to consider, and Raiser’s
Edge will group your donors accordingly.
Constituent Profile (Profiles, Lists and Directories)
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Design your own concise profiles to include key information from the tabs of the constituent
record: gift history, actions, notes, relationships, etc. These profiles can conveniently be
run directly from the constituent record or based on query groups. Print to paper or save to
a PDF and send via email!
Tickler Report (Action Reports)
This report lists upcoming and/or past actions, organized by solicitor, or staff member.
Print each solicitor’s actions on a separate page and distribute at the next committee
meeting to help your volunteers stay on track.
Annual Statement (Financial Reports)
Easily generate helpful statements for your donors totaling their contributions from the
previous year. This report has a customizable layout and keeps the Raiser’s Edge jargon to
a minimum, making it easy for donors to understand.
Reports that Aggregate Financial Information
Campaign, Fund and Appeal Performance Analysis (Campaigns, Funds and Appeals Reports)
These three reports are the heart of your fundraising performance tracking. Easily report
on progress to goal, total number of donors and gifts, and average gift size. For Appeals,
the report also includes expense information and Package details. Did we just cheat in
counting these as a single report? Can you blame us?
Comparisons and Summaries (Demographic and Statistical Reports)
The “Summaries” report lets you analyze performance over five time periods of your
choosing for a wide variety of fields: Fund, Gift Size, ZIP code, Constituent Code, just to
name a few. The “Comparisons” report will compare performance over two time periods
and tell you if totals have increased or decreased. (We may have cheated again, but we
couldn’t stand to leave either of these off the list!)
Statistical Reports (Demographic and Statistical Reports)
The highlights of the Statistical Report are the “Percent of Total Given” and “Percent of
Participation” columns. They make it easy to analyze who is really supporting your
organization. Base this report on Constituent Code, a Constituent Attribute, ZIP code, etc.
to learn the characteristics of your donors.
Pledge Status Report (Pledge and Recurring Gift Reports)
This powerful report is a basic element of your suite of pledge reports. Use it to reconcile
outstanding pledge balances with your Business Office, in summary (by Fund) or in detail
(by Constituent). Like some of the other pledge reports, the Pledge Status report can
report on pledge balances at a point in the past.
Custom Reporting Options
By now it’s become clear that we can’t keep this to just 10 reports, so we’ll abandon that
effort (there are just too many good reports in RE) and talk a bit about custom reporting.
First off, there are two primary reasons people look at custom reporting options:
The necessary information (aggregated numbers, details, etc.) isn’t available on a
standard report.
The format in which the information is displayed is undesirable.
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In all honesty, we’re not big supporters of using custom reporting solutions to address the
formatting issues of the second bullet. Custom reporting solutions usually bring with them
a few inherent issues that outweigh their benefits when the goal is simply rearranging
figures you’re already able to successfully retrieve from RE. Some of those issues include:
Manual custom reporting (see options, below) are rife with opportunity for human
error.
Automated custom reporting requires a higher level of technical expertise to develop
and maintain. While that may not be an issue right now, when your reporting “guru”
wins the Lotto (or otherwise leaves your organization) it can be difficult to continue
the reports they’ve built.
With that said, options for custom reporting include:
Excel – We jokingly refer to this as everyone’s favorite RE reporting feature.
Unfortunately, manipulating information in Excel leaves one wide open to user error,
and it can be both difficult and time-consuming to generate the same report from
one month to the next. Add to this the near-impossibility of accurately recreating
results for a prior time period and you have a recipe for a reporting disaster.
Crystal Reports – We *love* these. However, we are card-carrying geeks. They do
have a great role to play for some organizations. Crystal Reports is a top-notch
reporting tool with great features and extensive reporting power especially when
paired with direct access to RE data through the back-end SQL tables. (Told you we
were geeks!) They require some technical prowess and a certain degree of
fearlessness to set up and maintain, so we recommend a good, hard look at your
reporting priorities before jumping into them.
Pivot Reports – Built directly into RE, but leveraging some powerful features from
Excel, these reports can be the quickest route to sophisticated slicing and dicing of
your data. Armed with the RE Help Menus and some simple query skills, you can be
up and running on some basic reports within an hour. This feature shines with
simple aggregated reporting. It’s less impressive with details, and the formatting
not very pretty, but it’s definitely worth a look.
Export – This good old-fashioned RE feature is fantastic for getting detail out of the
system. It has many sophisticated filters that can operate like mini-reports such as
total number of gifts or total dollars given. Exports can be saved and replicated over
and over, and they don’t require any additional skills or substantive training. Never
“dump” data from Query again!
Next Steps
So where do you start when it looks like you need a custom solution? We suggest the
following:
1. Ask yourself: Do I want information I can’t get through a standard report, or am I
looking for formatting changes? If it’s the latter, you might see how much flexibility
there is to keep the format you have. To make this issue real, ask yourself how
much you’d pay in cold, hard cash for the formatting changes you want.
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2. If you’re looking for information, is it because a standard report won’t provide it or is
it because your data can’t deliver because it’s too messed up? In 8 out of 10 cases,
organizations asking us for a custom report really need their core data streamlined
so they can get what they need out of the existing standard reports. If this is your
situation, check out our Free Resources around Coding or call us!
3. If you’ve determined that you’re seeking information and that your data is in good
shape, then perhaps a custom solution is the best route. If you’re looking for
detailed, record-by-record data, start with Export. If you need aggregated
information, start with Pivot Reports. If neither of those meet your needs, fasten
your “geek belt” and jump into Crystal Reports. Clarify what information you want
on your report and where that data is stored in RE, take some basic Crystal Reports
training, and dive on in. You’re in our pool now, and the water’s great.
Let us help you with your Raiser’s Edge System!
Through our experience at over 600 organizations across the nation, we've developed a
clear, sound process for optimizing our clients' use of the Raiser's Edge software. Our
services include system assessments, data conversions, data cleanup (including codes /
tables and duplicates), process design and documentation, query and report setup, and
training. For our clients with advanced needs, we can develop Crystal Reports, integrate
with other databases, and perform custom programming. These services provide our clients
a solid foundation for effective use of this powerful fundraising tool. Contact us today to
find out how we can help you!
For more information:
Meaghan Kolyszko, Sales Director
510-841-4222 x460
meaghan@teamheller.com
[email protected] | www.teamheller.com
