When trying to show donor retention, I keep losing our folks with multi year pledges. They aren't "dropping" us as donors during the years they are paying off pledges. How is everyone else pulling these statistics?
Currently have a List with 20 years of fiscal year annual giving using contribution date and exporting to run all kinds of analysis ( because I have to include soft credits).
Thank you!
Hi Laurel, this is a tricky one! We have a custom list criteria for contribution transaction date (rather than gift date) which could help. I've got a screenshot of the query below. The only other thought is maybe pull out the multi-year pledges and check them manually? Obviously, that depends on how many there are. You could also likely do something in the Finance cube of Analytics by using the transaction date.
The issues we have with that are this:
The number of value columns you can have in analytics (20 columns to do 2023-2014 Annual and Event Columns) We want to go back and do recognition and retention stats for 25 years and be able to separate out event contributions vs regular contributions (and of course remove Memberships). Soft Credits are also a must for retention (not available in Analytics yet we are on 15) We are also getting ready to go into a major multi year campaign where this will become super problematic really quickly. Manually editing every report to manage all pledge payments would be crazy.
If we use Transaction date, any gifts from previous years that get adjusted during the year would get included as well unless we can figure out a way to say trans date during X year AND Contribution Date during x year.
In List I am using Contribution Last Year Giving (20+ values) and filtering on them in output which doesn't seem to let you write a query to edit filter.
We haven't been on quite a year yet, so I may be just missing something that everyone else has figured out for ages and i am just not savvy enough yet