Reporting Basics: Top tips to manage your reports
Customer Success & Support Manager, Alice pulled together her top tips to get the most out of your reports.
Your Data Exports are a goldmine of insights to keep track of your events, fundraisers, and donations. Whilst your dashboard can give you a good overview of your site, your Data Exports will give you a deeper insight into what’s happening and how it's performing.
Here’s our top tips to make them quick and easy to manage:
1. Choose your Data Source
The main four Data Sources are:
- Donations - for data on your donations and donors including where they’ve come from
- Fundraisers - for data on your fundraiser’s activity and funds raised
- Events - for data on your event performance including entrants and amount raised
- Transactions - for data on all your transactions from donations, fees and sales to reconcile your payments
To learn more about Data Sources, check out our Creating Custom Reports article.
Top tip: Whilst you can use your Fundraisers data source to find how much each individual has raised, it won’t include all donations needed to calculate your Total Event Raised. A Donations report will detail out all the donations made to your event, regardless of if they were to an individual, team or the event as a whole.
2. Choose one of our Pre Built Templates
Not sure where to start with reporting, or tight for time? Check out our Pre Built Templates where we’ve pulled together our recommended data selections. You can always customise them later with new data fields, but they’ll get you up and running in a few clicks.
Simply head to:
Data Exports > +New Export > Prebuilt Templates
Highlight the template you want to use and hit save.
3. Filter instead of duplicating reports
Make your reports easier to navigate by creating master reports and filtering the data you need. This will allow you to easily pull data on fundraisers, donations, events and everything in between.
To learn more about Filters, check out our Creating Custom Reports article and scroll to Data Filtering.
4. Clone instead of starting from scratch
Clone your existing master reports for Donations and Fundraisers in a few clicks. This way you can then add, remove or reorder any data fields you need risk free.
To clone a report, simply find the report you like:
Edit the report > More Options (top right) > Copy Export
5. Choose a naming convention
Make your reports easy to find and identify by choosing a consistent naming convention amongst your team. That way you’ll know at a glance what to expect in a report and how to find it.
For example, you could choose:
- Event name_Fundraisers_Year
- Campaign name_Donations_Year
- Donations_Master report
- Fundraisers_Master report
6. Monitor your supporter journeys
Setting up your reports before your campaign or event goes live will make it easier to track your performance.
For example, you might have a unique registration flow for your event and have new data fields you need to capture. Setting up your reporting before your new event goes live enables you to capture the right data you need from the start, rather than having to back-track and fill in the gaps.
If you test your registration or donation flows before your site goes live, you can make sure they match what you’re expecting to see.
By taking these simple actions and investing time early on your campaign or event will be easier to manage, and you can then use your reporting insights to adapt your campaign in flight.
For more reporting tutorials, tips and expertise, join one of our regular training sessions, or check out Creating Custom Reports.
If you’d like further help please pop in a support ticket from your admin and our team will assist you.
Alice Denny
Customer Success & Support Manager
Funraisin, UK team
For the past decade Alice has lived and breathed event management. Taking on everything from Rugby World Cup 2015 to Google Cloud Next 19, there’s no corner of the event landscape she hasn’t seen. With her extensive industry experience and global expertise she knows what it takes to make your event a success.
