Reporting on giving from related constituents

Using List Manager to capture giving by related constituents

It is possible to search for giving totals received from related constituents in your database. This functionality is available in List Manager, accessible by navigating to Constituents > List Manager:

It's important to note that you can search for related constituents only from within an existing list in List Manager. Within the list, creating an additional list lets you then pull the related constituents from your original list into a new list. The list of related constituents is derived from the original list. It is not possible to create a related constituent list in any other way.

How you can use a related constituents list

A good example of a related constituents list applies to the parents of students. To create a total giving report on the parents of students in your database, you would first create a list containing the students.

You can then use the related list in your search and in your report to pull in the related constituent giving data.

To see this in action, follow these steps:

1. Create your new list.

2. Name and save the list:

3. Navigate to List Manager (Constituents > List Manager) and click on the name of the list on which the related list will be based. Then click on the Related Lists tab. Now you can create the derived list that allows you to report on giving from related constituents:

NOTE: Another common use of derived related lists is to search for giving by the Parents of student constituents.

2 common reports related constituent lists allow you to create

Two common ways to report on giving from parents of students, for example, include total giving by related constituents and total giving by related constituents to a fund, campaign, event, or appeal.

The following sections show you how to create these two reports. But you can also report on other types of giving from related constituents by extrapolating from these instructions to pull together your target data.

Create a report on total giving by related constituents

A common example of a report on total giving by related constituents is total giving by parents of a particular class year or range of class years. This is a useful report to generate when a segment of your constituent database consists of students.

To find total giving by parents of a specific subset of students, the first step is to create or access your list and then build your parent list (the related list), as described in the previous section.

Now let’s create a total giving report by searching on the related list from the Constituents tab. (NOTE: It is also possible to search for the related list from the Fundraising tab and create a custom report from there.)

1. Go to the Constituents tab, search on your related constituents list, and then click the Export results button:

2. From here, you can choose the columns for your report, including the Total Giving (custom) column, to see how much the parents of the group of students from your list gave during your target time period:

3. Remember to make sure your Total Giving field's custom options contain any restrictions you included in your search, such as gift date:

4. Once you’re happy with the preview of your report...

... you can save it and open it in Excel.

Create a report on total giving by related constituents to a campaign, fund, event, or appeal

Steps for creating this report are identical to those for creating a total giving report. The only differences are that you'll bring the "Campaigns (giving)", "Funds (giving)", "Events (giving)", or "Appeals (giving)" search criteria into your search:

You’ll need to customize the custom options in any Total Giving field/s you use in your report to reflect these attributes as well, whichever one/s you want to restrict by. If you’re searching on total giving from parents who gave to your annual campaign last year, for example:

...you’ll want to customize your total giving field's custom options to restrict by that campaign too (in addition to your target dates), so that gifts that were not given to the campaign but were given by the same constituent to a different appeal, fund, or event aren’t brought into your report data:

This same method would apply to whatever gift attribute you are using in conjunction with your date search. Just remember that the more restrictions you use in the custom options for a field, the more data you are telling LGL not to pull in. Your results will always depend on how your gifts are coded.

You can then preview the report to make sure the data is looking right, and then save and open in Excel.