CLIENT SPOTLIGHT: Widener University

Custom reporting is not a luxury but a necessity for nonprofit organizations. If data is one of the most important assets of a nonprofit organization. The tools to utilize and interpret data are equally as valuable.

There are two new tools for your technology tool chest that nonprofits should be looking at – Power BI/Tableau and Power Automate.

Let’s review what these tools do:

• Power BI/Tableau are visualization tools. What does this mean? It takes your spreadsheet and transforms your data into an easily digestible graph – bar, line, pie, heat, etc. It also classifies data in a way that makes sense to your organization.   

• Power Automate – allows you to pull data and automate tasks that are often mundane or require accurate execution each and every time. For example, you must classify data into groups based on specific characteristics. The only person who can do this work is “Bob.” Well, it might be time to automate.   

Let’s look at how one of our clients uses these tools to gain greater insight, save time, and gain greater insight into their donor relationships.   

Who:

Widener University, Advancement Office 

What:

The Widener University Advancement Team has two reports that are considered business critical.     

The first report is similar to a donor category report; however, due to the complex criteria and data to be listed using canned reports, it was impossible.   

The second report shows the data on giving one-time donations and pledges over various fiscal periods. This report helps the leadership team quickly see goals vs actuals. More importantly, this report provides quick insight into where some gaps in revenue may exist.    

This job was very manual. Troubleshooting errors was often a time-consuming task due to the multiple steps that had to be taken to merge and purge data.   

Where:

Each of these reports was generated monthly.   

The time and effort to create these reports is estimated at 5 – 6 hours per report.   

The team within Advancement Services was proficient in running these reports; however, any error within the data entry process or the manual process of creating the report meant hours of re-work.  

When:

Most of the work occurred outside the Raiser’s Edge database within Excel.   

Several CSV files of canned reports were merged with queried data in order to ensure the correct values were represented in the report.   

Why:

The why was easy – it started as a time saving task, but the staff at Widener soon realized they now have time for more in-depth data review.  

Like many users, RE canned reports provide a portion of the data. But often, additional columns or calculations are required. Excel allows users to create what is required. However, as most users know, Excel requires the creation of a new report every time.   

Outcome:

Using Power BI, the Sentinel Consulting team created the required reports. Rather than re-creating the process every single time, the report is ready in minutes. The leadership team does not have to wait until the end of the month for this data. Reports can be refreshed daily. A power automate workflow was created to obtain updated fund attribute information that is currently unavailable using the SKY API. Fingers crossed!

Custom reporting and data analytics should be on your radar have been on the radar for most organization for the last few years. Now is the time to jump in and make this a reality. If you would like to learn more reach out to our team or join us for our Power BI webinar on April 16 at 12pm ET.