When people give money to the main organization, they specify which programs they are supporting. Sometimes people give to just one program, such as a conservationist working to save African elephants. Other times they will send one donation and divide it up among half a dozen programs.
Thanks to the Nonprofit Success Pack’s allocations functionality, keeping track of incoming funds is pretty straightforward. Each donation has at least one related record on the allocations object that tracks how it is to be split up among the conservation programs.
The problem comes when you try to create an efficient process to thank donors, or when you try to send reports to each conservationist with detailed information about the donations they’ve received. That’s because key information about the donations lives on different objects, and it’s hard to bring it all back together.
Every month, the main organization sends each conservationist a report showing the funding that has been donated for their program.
In addition to providing a total of all earmarked donations, the organization also lists each donor and their current and historical donation totals. Also, since many of the donors are affiliated with zoos or other wildlife organizations, they also list the separate donations these organizations have made.
This level of detail is crucial to allow the conservationists to communicate with donors and steward donors appropriately.
Before installing Multi-Step Reporting, the organization had come up with a cumbersome way of creating this report. Basically, they created rollup fields to summarize donations for the six different time periods they wanted to report on: year to date, last year, two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, and five years plus ago.
Of course, these rollups needed to be created on both the Contact and on the Account object, because some donations were from individuals and some from companies and organizations.
And the only way to get program-specific totals for each conservation program was to create a full set of rollup fields for each and every program.
Twelve rollup fields. Thirty different conservationists.
That’s 360 rollups cluttering up both the contact and account screens. Not only was this cumbersome and a resource hog, but you can’t even create and maintain that many rollup fields without custom code or a special add-on that starts at about $1000 a year.
This was the situation that Data Geeks Lab inherited when TJ went to work, and she solved it with Apsona’s Multi-Step Reporting.
With Multi-Step, TJ was able to scrap all those rollup fields. Instead, all the heavy lifting is done inside the different steps of the Multi-Step tool. The process relies on three crucial features of Multi-Step that distinguish it from regular Salesforce reporting: filters, metrics, and conditional logic.
To create the report, the first step specifies the particular conservation program. Then, for each donation to that program, the Multi-Step report pulls the name and contact information for the donor, conditionally looking to see whether the donor is an individual or an organization. This links the data to the right contact or account object.
Then the report marches through six steps to produce the donation totals for each of the time periods needed. Instead of using rollup fields, Apsona’s date filters and metrics produce the results. Each step of the report has a date range that it’s looking at, and Multi-Step’s metrics functionality can calculate the sum, count, or average amount of donations, without any need to export to Excel. No custom fields are required to make it work.
For donations from individuals, the report then looks up any affiliation the individual might have with a zoo or other conservation organization. If an affiliation exists, it then produces another six columns showing gifts from this organization over the same time periods as the individual gifts.
The end result is one report instead of 30, and a streamlined process that eliminates the need to maintain and update hundreds of rollup fields. The client saves the expensive annual license cost and the in-house Salesforce administrators don’t have to waste time maintaining rollup fields.
