Can anyone advise me on how to find my org's donor retention rate?
Drew,
Unfortunately, I don't know of any baked-in Reports or Utilities which will quickly help you arrive at your organization's donor retention rate. There are definitely ways that you can use Tessitura to get the information and process it in Excel to get this, though.
The "easiest" way is to run a Fund Activity Report for your entire organization's contributions for your current fiscal year and then for the previous fiscal year (or for the last completed fiscal year and the fiscal year prior to that).
Save those Reports down to Microsoft Excel and then bring them both into a new Excel workbook. Then you can copy all of your constituent Tessitura IDs and names and use the SUMIF functionality of Excel to report out what was received from the constituents in the two fiscal years.
Once you have all of this data, you can analyze the data and figure out how many people had gifts in both fiscal years, and then how many people had given in the older fiscal year but not in the current/more recent fiscal year. With this information, you'll be well on your way to finding out that retention rate.
Thank you,
Brian