4 key year-end reports you need to run right now

With year-end almost here, are you hearing questions like …

• How are we doing?
• Are we going to meet our year-end goals?
• Are there donors who haven’t given yet this year that we should reach out to?

If you’re in charge of fundraising at your nonprofit, you might sink a little deeper into your chair with each question. Fortunately, in Little Green Light (LGL), this kind of data is right at your fingertips.

Here are 4 key year-end reports you can run in your LGL account right now.

Year-end report #1: This year versus last year

Looking at some sample data in LGL, let’s start with our performance this year compared to last year. On the LGL Dashboard, there’s a widget that shows your fundraising totals and lets you toggle back to prior years.

In this screenshot, you can see the totals for 2018 on the left, compared with the totals for 2017 on the right. Our totals appear to be lagging a bit behind last year’s: Gifts this year total $34K compared with over $40K last year.

However, we likely raised a fair bit during the holiday season last year. Using the “Year to date?” filter, we can see what our 2017 totals were as of this date last year. Indeed, now when we look at last year, we can see we’re actually ahead.

Year-end report #2: Are we going to meet our goals?

Your fundraising goals are likely indelibly stamped on your brain, but in LGL you can also set specific goals by campaign, fund, appeal, or event. On the summary page for each one, LGL shows you your progress toward the goal.

Click into any of these areas from the Fundraising tab at the top of any page in your LGL account:

You’ll see a summary of your performance, including a graphical display of progress toward any goals you’ve defined:

Your goals can span multiple years. A capital campaign, for example, might stretch over three years.

Year-end report #3: Which donors should we focus on in our end-of-year appeal?

LGL offers a really convenient way to see your top donors’ gift histories for the current and prior two years. It’s one of the Fundraising Views you’ll find in the Fundraising > Giving area.

This particular view is called Giving by constituent/year. To identify donors on whom your time will likely best be spent, focus on those who have contributed little this year but gave somewhat significantly in prior years:

This view can also be filtered by gift type, campaign, fund, appeal, event, and other gift attributes.

While we’re looking at Fundraising Views, another great view for a year-end report is Giving by category, which shows totals for each of your gift categories:

There’s also a view for Giving by primary steward. If you’re fortunate enough to have multiple people in your organization who are actively involved in fundraising and stewardship, this will be a great search for you.

Year-end report #4: Cashflow forecast

If you have recurring donations coming in through your LGL forms account, there’s an excellent new report you need to know about. It’s a comprehensive report of all recurring donations, and it shows the amount, payment schedule, any end dates, and whether the recurring donation is still active:

From this report, you can quite easily calculate your scheduled payments by month. You could first sort by the billing cycle and then sum the amount expected per month and then by quarter and year.

This report is available in your LGL forms account, under Donations/Payments > Scheduled Recurring:

Here are a few related articles that may interest you:

How to identify the best donor prospects in your LGL database

5 basic fundraising reports you can use today

10 awesome resources on how to raise more money at year-end

Common reports and how to create them