Can anyone advise me on how to find my org's donor retention rate?
I wonder…..Would the campaign giving comparison report found in the development folder give you want you want? You would be able to see whether or not a patron that gave to you last year also gave to you this year as well as any variance in their giving.
Michelle Wohlers
Tessitura Database Manager
t. 619.533.7042 w. sdopera.org
3074 Commercial Street
San Diego, CA 92113 t. 619.232.5911 w. scenicstudio.sdopera.org
From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Brian Parker Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2016 8:27 AM To: Michelle Wohlers Subject: Re: [Tessitura Development Forum] Donor Retention
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
From: Drew Smith <bounce-drewsmith4519@tessituranetwork.com> Sent: 10/26/2016 4:56:39 PM
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Julie and Michelle definitely have good suggestions for reports here as well; my only thinking was that there isn't really a singular report that you could click on, run, and say, "Our donor retention rate is X%." (Somebody needs to install one of those Staples easy buttons!)
I like the Campaign Giving Comparison report (under the Campaign and Appeal folder) for the reasons that Michelle points out, but it'll still require some manual working of data to arrive at a retention rate number. I also like using it more as a targeted comparison than a general comparison (our Campaign structure is such that we have separate Campaigns per fiscal year for our Annual Fund, membership societies, Corporate Giving, Foundation Giving, etc.) just because it can get unwieldy to try and measure all of the kinds of giving that we receive in one spot.
Note that the documentation does include individual entries on all of the Tess-provided reports as well; the hierarchy is Reports and Utilities > Report and Utility Documentation and then it's broken down by the individual folders. Taking a little time to browse these will probably help narrow down which reports you can pull together to end up at your data goal.
I'll make a plug for Tessitura Tech Services group... for not too much $$ you can get a retention report built. I don't run giving via memberships, so the useful reports are at a minimum for me.
Tech services built a 5-in-1 report a couple years ago that has been transformative. Reports include fund $$ with budget; $$ by appeal category; $$ and donor count by donor level; renewal $$/count by donor level, and retention rates - overall and by donor level. One click and all these reports are in my hands. We built a "detail" version where I can see exactly who the donors are for each report, if I need it.
Megan HallSeattle Symphony
Megan,
That sounds amazing; I'll have to look into that on our end!
Megan, would you mind providing a screenshot of this report? I'd love to use it as inspiration in creating a similar report for my org. Thanks!