Name: Sustainer-Focused Reporting in Luminate Online
Uploaded: 2025-09-16T20:03:06.810Z
Duration: 38 min 12 s
Description: Sustainer-Focused Reporting in Luminate Online

Transcript for "Sustainer-Focused Reporting in Luminate Online": Alright. Looks like we are about at times. So good afternoon. Good morning, everyone. I'm Libby Wash and I'm happy to welcome you to this Blackbaud Connect for Success session. So I'm gonna give a little bit of time for more folks to join. And, big picture, again, this is gonna be our third session around sustainer giving. So you may already have a sustainer program today, or you may be starting from scratch. Either way, you're in the right place. So, for today's session, we'll be focusing on the reporting aspect of sustaining our giving and lemonade online. And for all of our attendees today, again, big welcome to you. And please feel free if you'd like to introduce yourself, share who you are in the chat, and if you have a sustained or giving program already as well. We'd love to hear from you. Now we've also got teammates behind the scenes that are helping to answer any questions that you may have, and those can be posted to the q and a tab. Just helps us keep up with the questions a little bit better there. Looks like we've got a fairly sizable group today, and we're gonna do our best to answer as many questions as we can. So, again, welcome everyone and definitely encourage you if you'd like. Again, feel free to put your information in the chat. You know, say hey to one another and if you have a sustaining giving program already or not. Alright. And as we always like to do a little bit of webinar housekeeping. So the webinar audio is being broadcast directly through your computer speakers. So hopefully you all can hear me. And if anything changes, let us know. If you encounter any audio or technical challenges, like anything like that, usually, just a quick refresh of your browser will do the trick. If you need to, you can close out and then come right back in, and that's okay as well. Now as far as navigating the webinar, of course, we've got the chat tab. Next to that, we've got the docs or session. And then finally, the q and settings. There's a little cogwheel at the bottom that you can utilize as well. Alright. Okay. So as I mentioned, I'm Libby Washburn, one of the customer success managers here at Blackbaud. I'm based in Greenville, South Carolina. And today, I have the pleasure of introducing you to Erin, this is who many of you may know as one of our amazing Luminate online gurus. Erin, would you like to share your intro and kinda kick things off with a little bit more about our agenda for today? Sure. Hi, everybody. My name is Erin Zisser, as Libby just said. I'm a senior functional expert here at Blackbaud with Illuminate online. I've been here for nineteen years as of last week, actually. And before I was a functional expert, I was on our web dev team. So I was here even when we were still just little convio. And, when when the functional expert team got started, it was kind of a perfect fit for me to jump into. I am currently located in Asheville, North Carolina. So hey, Jim, at Asheville Humane. You guys have an amazing organization. And I'm from New York originally, so I kinda bounced back and forth between the two. I still have a lot of family up there. And, yeah, I guess, let's talk a bit about session three today. Right? Some of you may have already attended our other two sessions. This is session three in a series of three. It's our final session on sustained giving, and I'm so happy that you're all here today joining us for these. Our first session focused on ways to update your donation forms for sustained giving. So if you were there for the first one, that's what we talked about, and that was two months ago. And then the second session, which was last month, we went over ideas for stewardship and retention. And today, we're really gonna focus on measuring success. Libby, do you have anything else you wanna share? Do you want me to jump right into the the, demo? Yeah. Absolutely. Erin, let me go ahead. I'll stop sharing the slides and give you the floor for you there. Perfect. Thanks, Wesley. Yeah. I just saw what you said about, recovering in Asheville. It's been almost a year since Helene. I was really lucky when my house is, I didn't have any flooding issues, but we had some down trees and things. And anybody that's thinking of coming here for the fall leafing season, please still come. The city definitely needs the tourism, and the Blue Ridge Parkway just got reopened north and south. So you can go all the way up to Mount Mitchell and all the way, down to where the parkway ends. So it's about to get really, really beautiful here. I'm gonna stop sharing my camera so I can share my screen because I don't wanna have any lag. So I will go ahead and turn off my face, and I'll share my screen here in a second. But, again, what I was saying earlier is that today, we're gonna focus on measuring your success. And so how do we wanna do that with our sustaining programs? Right? How do we wanna track and measure that success? Well, using our sustainer focus reports, that's a great way to do so. So we're gonna take advantage of ready made and also custom reporting in Luminate online. So what I'm gonna do today is show you guys how to pull some of those reports. I'm gonna show you on one of our, demo back end so you can see. And if you'd like to follow along, you absolutely can. I'm gonna go kind of slowly. So if you wanna log in to your Illuminate instance and follow along with me, you absolutely can. So a quick note before I get into the demo. I've said this on the past two sessions. I'm gonna say it again today. When you signed up for these sessions, you were invited to watch the foundational webinar called how to grow, retain, and nurture your sustaining donors. If you haven't seen it yet, that's totally okay. Don't worry. It's not gonna impact today's session. However, watching it is really gonna offer valuable context, and it's highly recommended. So there's a link to the webinar under the document section for that, and you should have also gotten a link when you signed up. It should have been in there, and it's also on the landing page for these sessions. So the reason I say that it's really important, for what we're doing is because that really went over the how and the why, of the things that we do with sustained giving sustained giving. Excuse me. And what I'm gonna show you today is kind of the the how do we do that. Right? So if I'm gonna talk about the slides that I'm referencing here or referencing back to that functional webinar foundational webinar. Excuse me. And what that's really gonna do is you know, that foundational webinar gave you the reasons why, and then I'm showing you the how to actually do it. So you'll hear me, you know, talk about it a bit today, and I'll talk about referencing some slide numbers. And so when you go back and listen to this again later on or if you're taking notes, you can, of course, go back and check out those slides that correspond with what we're gonna do today. So let me go ahead and share my screen, and then we can get started. Okay. Libby, if you can just let me know when when you guys can see that because now I can't see anything but what I'm sharing. Yep. Looks good. Yep. We're seeing your home screen there or your home page. Excuse me. That's great. Thank you. Okay. So if you guys are logged in to your Luminate, back end, this is what you will see as well. Mine obviously says system admin and blueprint site because this is one of our demo sites. But if you're on your site, it'll say your name, and it'll say the name of your organization at the top there. So the first thing we're gonna talk about is ready made reports or what we we would look at under reports classic. So if you're following along with the foundational webinar, we're starting at slide 53. So we're gonna use the ready made reporting in Luminate to keep track of your sustainers and measure the growth of your program across time. What do we wanna track each month? Well, some of the great values you wanna track are the sum of gift amount, count of gift amount, and the average of gift amount. So the we're gonna do this with a standard report in reports classic. So to get there, you're gonna go data management, and then you're gonna click on reports. And when you click on reports, you're taken to the landing page for reports. You'll see at the top here, we have a couple of different tabs, reports classic, which is where we're gonna start with our ready made reports, report writer, which we'll get into a little bit, which is our customized reports. And then if you wanted to see your report results, you can click on that tab as well. Since we're starting with one of our ready made results our ready made reports, excuse me, we're already on the right page here. So we're gonna go down to transaction reports, which for me is the second folder here, and I'm gonna expand that out. And then we're gonna choose transaction report, which is for me the first one in the list. So I'm gonna go ahead and configure this. I'm not gonna get too many results in mind because, again, this is a demo site, but you guys can then see how to run it on your end so you can see what you're getting. So when you're in here, you can, basically, the difference between classic and report writer is that in a classic report, you really only have the option to configure and and filter a little bit. And in report writer, which we'll look at in a few minutes, you really have the option to do quite a bit more and really customize it. So the options you have for a transaction report here, you can search by name if you need to. You can show transactions that were settled within a certain time period. So let's say we want to look at all of the transactions from August year, from last month. Right? We can choose 08/01/2025 to 08/31/2025. K? And then you also have the option to choose if you have different merchant accounts you wanna look at, and then you can choose if you only wanted to look at certain tender types. You could do that as well. For us, we're gonna leave it for all merchant accounts and all tender types, and then we wanna label this report. So I've already run one of these. We'll do that again. We'll name this test transaction report for Erin, and we'll name it September 16. K? Now once you've gone ahead and configured the report the way that you want to, you'll go ahead and click on the submit report button. When you click on submit report, you'll see all the different reports that have been run, and you'll see here our report is here at the top. And right now, the only action is delete because the status is in queue. If you want to wait for this to run and, you know, for me, I know this is not gonna take a while because it's gonna be a short report for me. I can just go up here and click this refresh this page button. So if I click that green button at the top, you'll see that my report is already pretty much run. So now I only have the option of view, print, and delete. Download will show up in a little bit. So for us, what we can do is go ahead now and click view, and you'll get all the information that comes with the transaction report. So in a transaction report, you get a view of sustaining gift transactions, but you also get other transactions all across Luminate. So that includes any of your donations, ticket purchases, Team Raiser Team Raiser registrations, and ecommerce purchases as well. So if we only wanna get a view of the sum count and average of your monthly sustaining gift transactions, There's a way to do that, and that shows on slide 53 of the foundational webinar that I keep referring to. So if you want to to be able to look at it that way, you're going to download your report. So up here, there are a bunch of different things we can do. We can print, we can download, and we can add the results to a group. We would go ahead and click download, and it'll end up giving you an Excel file. When you're in that Excel file, you can create a pivot table in Excel and set up the values in a certain way. And when you go to that slide 53 on the foundational webinar, it'll show you exactly how to set up that pivot table so you can get the information that you need there. K? So now that we've gone ahead and done a reports classic report, I wanna talk about, creating custom tailored reports with the report writer because these are gonna allow us to drill down in more detail. So we're already on the report page here. If you had to get to report writer from somewhere else, you would again go to data management and reports, and it'll bring you back to the main page we were on earlier. Since we're already here, we can just click on the report writer tab. Okay. So once we get to the report writer tab, we have a few different options. We're gonna go ahead and create a new report because this is a report we haven't run before supposedly, right, in our example. So we're gonna go ahead and click create a new report. And you'll see this is quite a bit different of a user interface than the reports classic is. Right? We have more options here. We're gonna run through all these options so you can see what the differences are between the classics and the more customized report writer. So under report selection, we're gonna again choose transactions. What's nice here is that everything is laid out alphabetically, so I know transactions is gonna be towards the bottom. I'll go ahead and click on transactions, and then I get all of the available reports to me that are in transactions application. So you'll see there's three different sustaining gift reports that we can run. The sustaining gift attempt details, the sustaining gift attempt summary, and the sustaining gift performance summary. The other thing that I really like about report writer is that you'll see next to each of our different available reports, there's a view sample link and a learn more link. So let's say we didn't know exactly what the sustaining gift attempt details report gave us. We can go ahead and click on view sample, and we'll get a pop up under our help files of an actual sample of the stained gift attempt details report. Now I apologize. I know this probably looks very small on your screen. When you open it on your help files, you can make it as big as you need to and see what this actually, pulls for you there. The other thing that's really nice is if we go ahead and click on learn more, that takes us directly to the help file for that report that we are thinking about pulling. It tells you what the report is, and then it shows you, again, a link to how to get to the sample of it, how to run it, and then the report columns that are available for that report itself. So if I go ahead and wanna see what report columns are available, I would click on that third link, and it does pull up all the different report columns that are available and then tells me what each one can show up as. So, for example, date of birth shows the month, day, and year of the birth of the constituent. Donor status can be one of the following things. So you can really drill down and see what each column in a report can give you. So this is great when you're trying to figure out, which report which type of report you wanna pull. Okay? So for the example I'm gonna run through with you guys today, I wanna do the sustaining gift performance summary. So we're gonna click on that there and then click on next. I think I already said this, but just in case I didn't, we're now on slide 54 of that foundational webinar. So if you go back and check that out again or wanna follow along there, we're on slide 54. So because this is a much more robust report that we we can really go in and edit, we can track many more things here than we could on just the classic report. So some of the things that we can track, and the whole list is on that slide 54, we can track total processed amount, total processed count, any of a failed amount or failed account failed count, excuse me, skipped amount, skipped count, canceled amount, canceled count. So there's quite a few things that we can go ahead and track. I'm gonna run through this with you guys and show you how we run this report. So if you haven't been a report writer before, you can see how to do that. Okay? So here on step two, which is where we are now, we get to select the columns that end up in our report. You really do have the ability to pull almost any information here that you need. So you can see it's very robust, and all of these are gonna kind of have a default column that's pulled. So if we scroll down here, really, the only default here that's pulled is the campaign title. So let's say we want to add some email information. Right? We wanna know if these constituents accept email and what their email is and maybe even their email status. We could always click on that if we wanted to. Under biographical information, maybe for some reason we want first and last name. I'm just you know, whatever you guys wanna put into these reports is up to you. I'm just doing this as an example. So don't feel like you have to use any of the columns that I'm using here, but I'm just showing you, hey. We can pull all this information in if we want. And then the meat and potatoes is really going to be down here under the sustaining gift performance fields. Right? So some of the things we talked about, total processed amount, total processed count. Let's also pull failed amount, failed count. Let's do the same thing for skipped. Let's do ongoing as well, and let's do canceled. There's more in the list, so you can certainly pull more if you want to. But for our purposes and for time, we'll just go ahead and and pull those for now. So let's say we've got all of the columns that we want for our report, and now we're gonna go ahead and click next. K. Now we get to the order and rename columns step. So what's really cool here is that let's say I wanted email to be one of the first things I see for some reason. I can go ahead and take that and drag it wherever I want. So let's say I want email underneath campaign title. Again, there's no right or wrong here. This is really what works for you and your organization and how you like to organize things yourself. Now let's say I've got all the columns in the order that I want them to. This is all fine, but I don't necessarily like the names of the column as Luminate has them. Maybe I wanna change something. Maybe instead of last name, I want it to be surname. So I can go ahead here and click on rename on the right hand side next to any of these columns and make it say whatever I want it to say. I'm gonna choose surname, and I'm gonna click save. So now you'll see that there is also a column here next to, last name, which is gonna show what it will show for me when I pull my report. K? So you can do that with any of these. You can do that with none of them. If you are comfortable with the way that Luminate has them named, you can just leave them the way they are. And if you're comfortable with the order, you can just leave it the way it is. So now we've got everything in the order that we want it to be. K? We're gonna click next at the bottom. And now we have the option to sort our columns, right, to arrange the reports in a certain way. So we can sort three different ways if we want. So you can choose which one here, and you can choose ascending or descending, and then you have a second and then a third. I'm gonna leave the sort order the way it is now. If that's something you guys wanna change, you have the ability to do so when you're building out your reports. K. We'll go ahead and click next, and then we also have the option to configure filters. So you can target appropriate information for report results using these filters. You can create new filters to restrict data, to include data, and then you can also edit them or modify the value of any existing filters. So it's kind of a cool thing to have if it's something that you need. So let's go ahead and create a filter. And let's say we want to filter by, let's do sustaining gift information, and then we can see here that sustaining gift status is any of the following. So we'll choose active. K? You can also edit at run times. That means every time it runs, if you need to edit this filter, you can. And then we'll go ahead here and click add this filter. If you decide this is not the filter you want, you can just click on cancel. Let's go ahead and add this filter so you guys can see what that looks like. Okay. Sustain and gift status is any of the following, active. We wanna edit it at one time. And let's say here you decide you made a mistake, you wanna edit it, you you can, or you decide you wanna delete it because you don't need the filter, you can. So we can go ahead I'm gonna leave it in so you guys can see what that looks like when we run it, but if you want to, you could just delete it here if we're just playing around. K? So now we're gonna go ahead and click next, And now we're up to the identify report section. So this is where you add your report label and and choose security category and all that. So let's do, we'll just name this Aaron's report writer example sustained giving, September 16. Again, name this whatever you want that makes sense for you with the organization. If you wanna put a description in so you can remember what you were pulling, you can do that there. Sometimes people will add, oh, this is my transaction report, and I'm pulling x, y, and z. Right? Again, that's only for you. You do not have to fill that in. Most people will leave the security category as general. You can, of course, change it if you need to. And then this is going into our custom reports folder. If you've made other folders, you can change which report folder it goes into. Again, this is for your, the way that you like to organize things. Okay? We'll go ahead and click next, and then we get our criteria summary that we have to review. So everything that we've just gone through in these steps is now here on the screen. Right? All the different columns we're pulling, if there's a filter, the name of the report, all of that good stuff. So now we have two options here. We can run the report if we wanna make sure it's giving us the configuration that we want, if we're getting the results that we want from the configuration. And then, we can kind of test it before we save it or set it to be recurring. And then if we know it's the report we want and the configuration is right and all that, we can just go ahead and save it. So I'll go ahead oops. Sorry. Pop outs. Okay. Sorry, guys. I had a rogue pop out show up on my page. I couldn't see anything. We're gonna go ahead and click on run report here, which is step two. K. And edit run time parameters. So we'll see here we have this filter that comes up. Right? We can modify this for the report. If we need to go in and edit it, we can. We can choose the operator and choose whether it's active, postpone, lapsed, whatever. We'll go ahead and click cancel because we don't need to change it. We'll go to next, identify results. So, again, the report label, if we need to change that here, we can. Set report schedule. This is a fun one. So we can choose to either run it immediately. We can choose to schedule to run at a separate time, or we can schedule this report to run on a recurring basis. So let's say you wanna pull this report once a month and you only wanna set it up once, it's gonna be the same every month. You can go ahead and set it up, schedule it to run on a recurring basis, and then you can choose when it gets sent to the when the report gets sent to the queue. And then you can choose what type of schedule, all of that stuff. So you can really go ahead and and choose with where this is gonna be. If you just wanna run it once but wanna schedule it at a future time and date, you can do that as well. For us, we'll just set up run report immediately. You can also send the email notification to administrators when the report is finished running if you wanna let people know that, hey, there's a report that's ready to view. K. We go ahead and click next. This is also kinda cool. If you wanna share the report results with any one of your admin groups, you can go ahead and do that here as well. So you can I don't know if we have any groups set up on this? There are a few. So we have advanced site administrators here. So if we wanted to show some people that, we could, and then we could always pull them over here as well if we wanted to. And then we can enter optional comments that, end up in the email that gets sent to the administrator. So, hey, team up. Just run this report on x, y, and z. Check it out when you have a chance. Something like that. K? So we get back to the very end. We see all the things again. We're not sharing the report anywhere because I didn't choose any of those groups on the last page. I just looked at them. Now everything looks good to me. We're gonna go ahead and click on run report. Now once we click on run report, it, will take a few minutes for it to run. This is showing you in real time when they're available. They'll appear here. Again, this is a very short report for me because it's a test test, a demo site. Excuse me. So that's how you use report writer to pull some of that information in sustained giving as well. This kind of also showed you how to use report writer for anything you really need in for Illuminate, even though we're focused on sustained giving right here. And then we'll wanna go back in. Let's say you want to change the way the report is configured or now that you know that it's giving you the information that you want, you can save it and you can also still share it from the screen. So if we wanted to save the report, we could go ahead and do that here. And if we wanted to edit the report configuration because one of the tables didn't come up the way we want it, it takes us back here and we just run through and edit again. Okay? Karen? Yeah. Super good question for you. So, in the filters, we did have a question come in about whether it's possible to filter on merchant accounts. Any thoughts? That's a good question. Let's see. I don't know if we can filter on merchant accounts, but you can go ahead and choose the merchant accounts in let's see. I don't think there's a way to filter on merchant accounts, but you can go in when you're, identifying the report, I believe, and choose. There was a place to do it, wasn't there? Let's see. Maybe we can do it. Yeah. No. I'm not sure off the top of my head. I'll have to check into that one and and get back to you on it to let you know. Okay. That's kind of a bit more detailed than I was expecting today, but we can find that answer out for you and get back to you. Absolutely. Okay. Okay. So those are the two things that I wanted to really show you guys today in demo were the, different ways that you can pull those Sustainer focused reports within Luminate. We do have plenty of time for questions. Sorry. I I will stop sharing here in a second, and open it up for any questions that everybody may have, and then we'll go over some final notes and and things as well. So I'll go ahead and stop sharing so I can see, the screen again. That is not just my screen. Then did anything come in, Libby, while, I was talking that you need me to to talk about? Or Sure. I think we had, one additional question as well. Do you happen to know? Can we use the sustained giving performance to show performance within a specific time frame? For example, this year, last month, things like that? Yeah. Mhmm. We can do that. You should be able to look back in there and see if I can find that. It may be in one of the let's see. I'm just looking on my end before I tell you guys specifically where that would be to find. So you can, put in a oh, sorry. Let me go ahead and share again. That would help so you guys could see what I'm sharing. I was about to start talking. I'm like, you guys can't see this. Okay. So under the, sustaining gift information down here, you can choose date, date and time, things like that. So you can go ahead and put that column in there and then, filter based on that. Okay. Once you've Yep. Any other questions? Let's see. I will say so it's it's not actually about reporting, but, as far as the new checkout model, and this may be and maybe, you know, product update briefing for fall may be the best answer, but, any, any thoughts on when a donor advised fund button might be available for sustainers? I'm I'm thinking I'm I'm I'm not sure off the top of my head. But Yeah. I don't I haven't been given a date for that yet. Complete cover and donor cover, I know is coming sooner than later. Mhmm. I'm not sure who asked the question, but I would say, your CSM might have a better idea once there's an actual date. Or you should be getting some emails that let you know when both of those things would be coming down. I think donor cover and complete cover are coming before, DAF, but I'm not positive of of dates for either yet. That would be more of a products question than a than a question for me, definitely. Yeah. I mean, I'm just big picture. Everyone, you know, definitely keep an ear out for when the, fall product update briefing will be. I I don't know if it's been decided. The dates are definitely to be determined. So it may be October, early November. It it I think they wanna push it out a little bit from BBCon. But Yes. But, yes, definitely stay tuned. Yeah. And we will be we will be doing another webinar on, donor cover and complete cover. So that'll probably be I think we're probably gonna do that at some point in October as well. So keep an eye out for those. We'll be we'll be going over kind of demoing like this, like, how to add it to forms and stuff like that. Okay. Sounds good. Alright. Well, we can, can keep an eye out for any other, questions that come in. But, otherwise, let's see. Let me go ahead and pull back to our slides here. Alright. Okay. So one thing that we, you know, definitely would love for you all to do if if you feel so inclined, is to take just a moment, share some feedback with us, and I will go ahead and launch the survey for that. So this is, you know, how we improve our webinars and, you know, make sure that we're focusing on content that is important to you all. So love hearing your feedback on that part. Alright. Okay. And as you are working on that, just want to, again, provide a little refresher on the variety of resources that are available on the docs tab. These are from our Blackbaud Institute. Definitely check them out and, see here what else we've got. Okay. One item that we also love to share during these webinars, if anyone is interested in increasing your engagement with Blackbaud, we have a variety of opportunities for you. So our Blackbaud champions program, great opportunity to participate in a gamified community for things like advocacy, product reviews, product feedback, if you like giving that to us, and, you know, just sharing content and participating in thought leadership, things like that. Now with our reference program, clients can participate by being a reference to speak one on one with a prospective client. And then for our customer evidence and storytelling a great opportunity to really share your organizational. I don't know if we I think it looks like we lost Libby. She might be having some issues with, her Internet. So we can give her a second to get back in here. I don't know, what the last thing was that you guys heard of her with the slides. So let's just give her one second to see if she can jump back in. There she is. My apologies. I just decided to turn my video off. My apologies, everyone. Alright. Now one thing, again, that we also like to share just in case you're new to Blackbaud, is our primary resources for you. So we have, you know, Blackbaud University for training, and the training team is always building out new trainings for us. Customer support, great if you have any, you know, product challenges or how to questions. And then, knowledge base, great source for how to questions and things like that. And then finally, the community, wonderful place to crowdsource information and even network with other organizations as well. So we've got blog posts there, discussion forums, all sorts of things. But that is all that we have for today. Thank you all for attending. Our apologies again about the technical challenges, you know, things like that. So really appreciate you bearing with us. But hope everyone enjoyed it. Again, definitely check out the docs tab for the resources for today, and hope everyone will join us in the future. Yeah. Thank you so much, everybody. If you do have any other questions that, you know, pertain to sustained giving, like Libby said, the best place to check out is gonna be some of those resources she talked about. You can also go to support if there's some issues with with anything, and then your CSMs if you can't find an answer at that point as well. But, again, we really thank you guys for attending. I hope that, these past three sessions have been helpful to you, and we look forward to see what you end up doing with your sustained giving programs. Thanks, everyone. Have a good afternoon. Bye bye.