What's New, Donorcat?

The New Donors Report is exactly what it sounds like - a report that lists first-time donors. Unfortunately, this description makes the report sound less sophisticated than it actually is and may cause the report to be overlooked in favor of its flashier siblings.

Despite a name that makes the report sound like a blunt instrument, the New Donors Report can be used for finer, more delicate reporting.

The traditional way to approach this report is straightforward. If you are looking for everyone who made their first gift, regardless of type, campaign, fund, appeal or anything else in a particular date range, all you have to do is select the date range on the General tab of the report and click Preview. This will give you unvarnished results.

On the other hand, if you wanted to find everyone who made their first pledge to the Annual Fund in a date range, you would select the Annual Fund on the Filters tab and include only Pledge on the Gift Types tab. This way, even if a donor had given a cash gift to the Annual Fund before, or made a pledge to the Building Fund on another occasion, he would still appear in your report if this was the first time he had ever made a pledge to the Annual Fund.

When filters are added to the mix, it becomes more likely that you will receive results that are different from what you can expect. The Campaigns, Funds, Appeals and Gift Types filters can trip you up if you're not careful. Using the example above, if you were looking simply for constituents who had given to the Annual Fund for the first time and didn't care about the gift type, you would be understandably distressed if someone who had previously given a cash gift to the Annual Fund appeared in the report. In that case, you would need to make sure that all gift types (and not just pledges) were included on the Gift Types tab.

A slip on the keyboard can cause the report to come out incorrectly as well. I once spoke with someone who had a donor who did not belong in the New Donors Report (due to an earlier gift) but stubbornly continued to appear in the results. The report was being filtered on GL Post Date, and when we checked the gift, we found that while the Gift Date said 1997, the GL Post Date said 1697! After some further testing, we found that if a constituent had not given a gift in 240 years, they were considered a new donor again. Keep this in mind when you run the report - constituents who last gave in 1767 might start popping up ;)

For more information on manipulating the report, see BB76760, and for more troubleshooting tips, see BB88622.

The answer to the Brain Buster in this month's issue of The User's Edge is four. Since it takes one user four hours to enter a batch, four users working at the same rate would be able to enter four batches in four hours.