A useful perspective on creating fundraising reports

Your donor management system is more than a place to store data. It’s a tool that fundraisers can use to make sense of that information. And creating fundraising reports is a key way to use your data in meaningful ways. Consultant Ed Hohlbein specializes in fundraising data, and he breaks fundraising reports into two types: exploratory and explanatory. In his experience working with clients, fundraisers who understand the difference between these two types of reports are better able to leverage their data and make informed decisions about their fundraising efforts.

What is an exploratory report?

Exploratory reports help familiarize you with your organization’s data. They aren’t polished reports that you’d share with board members or other stakeholders, but they can be very useful in your work as a fundraiser because they help you spot patterns and trends. Ed suggests thinking of an exploratory report as casting a net, reeling it back in, and seeing what information you’ve captured. Depending on what you’ve captured and your assessment of that information, you may decide to run another exploratory report to dig in a bit deeper.

Example of an exploratory report:

Maybe you have a hunch attendees at your annual gala don’t donate to your organization afterward. To see if your gut feeling is correct, you run an exploratory report of all your gala attendees from the past four years with their giving history. You cast your net and find that your instincts are accurate: the majority of attendees don’t make contributions to your organization beyond their ticket purchase—except for in one of the years. What’s different about that one year?

To dig into that question, you run another exploratory report. You find that in all but that one year, gala attendees didn’t receive any follow-up from your organization after the event. But in the year when attendees did convert to donors, they received a post-event e-blast thanking them for attending, they received your fall newsletter, and they were included in your year-end appeal.

Your exploratory reports have brought you some interesting information. It’s time to share your findings with your colleagues. And that means you need to create an explanatory report.

What is an explanatory report?

Creating this type of fundraising report allows you to clean up the raw data you uncovered in your exploratory report in order to share that story or narrative to a larger group of people. With an explanatory report, you build on the insights and patterns you discovered earlier so that you can present the data in a clear way to board members or other stakeholders.

Example of an explanatory report:

Now that you’ve uncovered patterns with attendees, you can put together an explanatory report to show the number of gala attendees who contributed to the organization when they received the annual appeal versus the numbers who contributed when they received no follow-up from your organization. And, you can show the amount raised in each case. You can use this explanatory report to make a compelling case that post-event communication needs to be prioritized if your organization wants to convert attendees to donors. Without these communications, the gala won’t result in building long-term support for your mission. In this way, your explanatory report helps your organization make informed decisions about your fundraising efforts.

Another important benefit to thinking in terms of exploratory and explanatory reports

If you’re new to creating fundraising reports and are feeling intimidated, or you’re adjusting to a new donor management system, Ed emphasizes that running exploratory reports is an effective way to build your confidence and skills. Ed wants to assure fundraisers that it’s okay if exploratory reports are messy—they’re just for you. And they serve an important function. The process of running exploratory reports familiarizes you with your data and with the reporting functionality in your system, all without the stress of deadlines or providing a finished product to colleagues. You’ll develop a sense of how your database works and how information fits together, such as how gift entry impacts the reports you can run.

Conclusion

Finally, Ed stresses the importance of accepting that running reports is “an iterative process.” One report may raise new questions, which prompts you to create another report. This is all part of the process, and understanding the difference between exploratory and explanatory reports can help you get comfortable with reporting and do so with purposeful intent.

About Ed Hohlbein: Based in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Ed is a nonprofit fundraising technologist who specializes not just in fundraising tools but also in optimizing and innovating how nonprofits manage data, workflows, and CRM systems to improve their fundraising outcomes and impact. In Ed’s words, he’s “done nearly everything you can do in a nonprofit from taking out the garbage to major gift fundraising and everything in between. I get it—the pain points, the stress but also the joys, the successes. It is with this breadth of experience that I approach my work with your fundraising data and systems.”