Hi all! I have been using Tessitura for about 3 months now and have been in fundraising for 9 years.
I'm figuring out the best way to use the dashboard to our benefit. For instance, I want to identify a contribution count within one FY that includes outright gifts and new pledges, and easily separate out pledge payments. Is this possible?
I'm also curious about how other fundraisers and organizations are utilizing the dashboard function. Have you found anything that streamlines your annual reporting? Many thanks!
Hi Laura! So if you're looking to split out pledge payments I would use the Finance Cube rather than the Contributions Cube. There's a field called Transaction Type where you can choose only the transactions you want to include (Gift, Pledge, Pledge Payment Received). If you use the Transaction ID (choosing the Count Unique type) it should give you the number of each of those transaction types, and then you can filter down by FY. Let me know if that makes sense or if you need any more guidance for that.
In terms of the dashboard functions for annual reporting, I've found it helpful in terms of comparisons to previous FYs, especially in how easily I can both look at big picture (like a chart or graph) and immediately notice interesting differences from year to year, but then also get down into the details to better interpret why there may be differences.
Colleen, thank you so much! I am going to try both of these and let you know how it goes.
For events, we use dashboards to keep track of our pipeline to hit our goal. Plans have been entered into accounts with an Ask (top value we are going to ask a donor for), a Goal (what we truly think we will get from said donor), and a Recorded amount (what a donor says they will give to us- whether it is in writing and can be entered in Tess or not). This feeds into the Dashboard by adding the value of Goals of Open Plans and Recorded Amount for Closed Plans. The difference between that and our goal number is the amount of revenue we need to find...and hopefully that number shrinks as we get closer to the event. We also do something similar for non-event giving.