Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Highlight," your quick hit on what's what in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

Online donations are an essential part of most Salsa users' programs, and we thought we'd revisit some of the options for tracking those donations in the toolset.

You have two basic choices: Tracking Codes and Tags. You can use either one or both together to classify your donations; the difference is:

• a single donation can have only a single tracking code; but
• a single donation can have many different tags.

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Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

This week, I wanted to share an oft-overlooked feature in Reports that may help your team get more out of your Salsa data.

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Greetings!
 
Salsa is pleased to announce a helpful upgrade to our ‘Reports & Statistics’ package!  You can now get access to all of your custom fields from the ‘supporter’ table without adding the additional ‘supporter_custom’ table. The upgrade will allow you to both add columns of custom fields you have created and set conditions on this data. Take a look at this video for a basic report utilizing the upgrade
 
Want some help diving into reports?

• Check out our expanded reports documentation on Salsa Commons; or,
• Join one of our upcoming webinars, like Reports 1 (Nov. 9) or Reports 2 (Nov. 23); or,
• Crib and modify our built-in reports

And as always, feel free to email us at support@salsalabs.com for any assistance on reporting.

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(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's what in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

With many organizations gearing up for end-of-year fundraising season, this is a good time to review some of Salsa's options for tracking incoming donations.

You have two basic choices: Tracking Codes and Tags. You can use either one or both together to classify your donations; the difference is:

• a single donation can have only a single tracking code; but
• a single donation can have many different tags.

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(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

This week's feature is one that I hope you've been making use of already: Salsa's expanded menus of built-in reports. My favorite thing about these system reports is that you can grab copies for your own headquarters, and customize them to your needs!

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(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

You probably know that we on the Salsa team create many different built-in system reports. Up until now, to access those reports, it's been necessary to drop them onto your dashboard.

But I'm pleased to, ah, report that we've simplified the process of browsing and using those reports.

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(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday!)

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

Last week, I shared highlighted Salsa's ability to automatically email you query results on a regular schedule.

This week, we'll take a look at that exact same feature in reports.

Schedule recurring exports of Report results

Just as with queries, for reports you need to execute regularly, you can let Salsa do the work for you by scheduling them to run automatically.

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(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday!)

Welcome back from Thanksgiving (for those who observe it), and welcome back to the 'Weekly Salsa Highlight,' your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program.

You can always get news, updates, and conversation on Salsa Commons. Salsa staff frequently post there as well, both to answer questions and to flag new feature developments.

Support specialist Anupama Pillalamarri did just that recently with a post on how to Manage Exports, a tool that automates Salsa's data reporting processes.

Manage Exports

If you've installed the newest version of the Supporter Query Tool package, you'll find the link right below the row of tabs on your Salsa Screen: "manage exports."

Salsa has long enabled you to schedule recurring exports of both queries and reports. The Manage Exports feature makes it simple to see at a glance what recurring exports are running in your account.

• To delete, reschedule, or otherwise edit an existing export, click "manage exports," pick your scheduled export from the list, and go from there!
• To build new exports directly from this section, click "Add an export." (As always, you can still build saved exports from the query and report tools, too.)

If you're already using scheduled exports, the Manage Exports area should streamline the process. If you're not yet taking advantage of this oft-overlooked feature, this is the perfect time to start! Give it a whirl, and give your whole team the holiday gift of timely information.

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(Promoted from the documentation: some highlights of popular questions about Salsa reports, many from our recent trainings, answered by Chelsea the support Jedi.)

Q: How do I find all donations (regardless of amount) for those donors who have given $500 or more at least once.

A: For this type of report, you'll want to select at least the Donation table, and also the Supporter table if you need information such as the Supporter's address. From there, I'd recommend selecting the supporter key and amount field (at least) from the column options, with conditions for Result = 0 and amount greater than 500. You can group by the supporter key value and add a group concat function on the amount field to return a list of all transactions greater than $500.

Q: What's the quickest and easiest way to see donation results from a specific email blast?

A: We use the email blast keys as tags to indicate conversion rates. If you create an aggregate report on Donations, you can select the columns that you need and then use the Filter by Tag option to filter your results to only those donation records that are tagged with a tag equal to the email blast key.

Q: Can you show us the format for the "start at this time" field?

A: When scheduling a blast to send to yourself (or using any date field in Salsa), you'll want to format the date like 2009-06-13 14:00.

Q: Can you run a report on supporter data like date created, but restrict it to only members of one group?

A: You can indeed. Under the first step of the report builder, you can use the Advanced Object Chooser to select these tables: Groups, Supporter Groups, Supporter and Supporter Custom if you need this as well. To remind you of the column selection then, you can select the Date Created field from the Supporter record and add a function of Month and check the Group by box, then add a count of the Supporter table's supporter key field, making sure to change the Label of the field so that it doesn't show up as a hyperlink but as a number.

(Note: Or, turn the group into a tag and simply filter by tag. -ed.)

Q: What is roll-up?

A: From our documentation: "When checked, a report with rollup will also display a sum total of aggregated sums as the last line of the report - for instance, in a count of people signing a petition month by month, the last line of a "rollup" report will show the total number of all people who have taken that action."

My coworker Jason also really likes to use this for donation reports. There's a bit more about it here.

Q: Is there printed documentation on this?

A: The reports documentation home page is at: http://salsacommons.org/o/8001/p/salsa/commons/package/?packageId=salsa.report.common  Through the Full Documentation, there's a link to a summary of commonly-used tables which will hopefully help with getting started on selecting your own tables: http://salsacommons.org/o/8001/p/salsa/web/wiki/public/?reference=Brief%20table%20summary

Q: if you upload a database (.txt) file can you run a report just on that database?

A: If you would like to view only supporters created from a particular file import, you can set the conditions for Supporter Source Details equal to the file name of the import. Optionally, you can also group or tag the records sat the time of import for easier retrieval.

Q: Please send an email to describe how to set the RESULT field on donation reports.

A: "RESULT = 0" indicates valid online transactions.  If you also have manually-entered transactions that you would like to see in your report results, I'd recommend using "RESULT is in list 0,-1" and adding a condition for "Transaction Type not like %Test%".

Q: Can you set the transaction date function to do "previous 30 days" so that it will consider the current date when running the report so you don't have to edit the report each time?

A: There are a couple options that are similar to this, including "In this month," "In the last week," "In the last 24 hours," "In the past," and "In the future" - These can be selected from the Function menu under the Operations or Function column on the Conditions tab. The report can also be set to accept any arbitrary user date or date range each time it is run.

Q: What's the difference between the conditions tab and the filter tab?

A: Anne gets credit for this succinct note: Conditions let you ask the database for info and then filters tell the report to show you a specified subset of the data that meet the conditions.  This, I thought was quite well put, but again, please ask if you need clarification.

Q: Can you talk about when and why the word "KEY" should be removed from some the fields before you actually run the report?

A: If you leave the default label as (for example) supporter.supporter_KEY, the end results will display as a link to the individual supporter record from the report window.

If you don't want the results to appear as a link, especially in a case where, for example, you'd want to display the actual count of supporter keys instead of a link to a single key, you'll want to rename the field with your own label.

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Custom report builders are not the easiest things to engineer: you're trying to present to the user an interface that's both intuitive and incredibly expansive, and effects a smooth transition from the nearly limitless arrangements of data that might be present in a user's mind to the very specific (and tedious) job of instructing a big dumb database exactly which data to find and exactly what to do with it.

Those that I've had to wrestle with in other databases in my nonprofit career have generally had me pinned within two rounds.

Which brings us to Salsa. The custom report builder in Salsa is incredibly powerful, but like many such, it can be a challenge if you're looking at it for the very first time. The fact that it's built to render a standard SQL query will be helpful to a minority of users, and utterly useless to most.

With that in mind, reports guru (and all-around support guru) Chelsea Bassett is leading a webinar trilogy this month on different ways to use the reports tool. The first one was yesterday, but there are still two more on the way.

• June 11: Email Reports
• June 25: Donation Reports

Should be a fabulous opportunity to mine the capacious brain of our beloved client support paladin.

Regardless of whether your reporting needs run to supporter data, email, donations, all of the above, or other things entirely, there are several underappreciated features in the report builder worth outlining, that may help you get the most from all that precious data.

1. You Can Copy a System Report

See a report in the standard Salsa library that's almost exactly what you want? You can get a local copy of any system report in your custom reports library and tweak to your heart's content.

To copy a system report,

1. Place the system report on one of your dashboard pages.
2. Hit "Full Report" to run it.
3. Click "Clone and edit this report" in the upper left-hand corner of the report results page.

Just navigate to your custom report list, and the copied report should be there for you to edit.

2. Reports Can Give Totals and Subtotals

In SQL land, this feature is called "rollup" -- and that's what it's named in the custom report builder. You can find rollup, perhaps unintuitively, under the "Filter" tab.

To get a subtotal,

1. Click on the "Group By?" box for at least one field under Columns.
2. Select a "function" (such as "Sum") for at least one field you're not grouping by.
3. Select "Rollup" under the "Filter" tab

You may be thinking here, "I want to see individual gifts add up to a sum, not a sum for every line."

Perfectly possible! Try grouping by the Donation_KEY field (or for other kinds of reports, the _KEY field on the table you're reporting). Since KEY numbers are completely unique, their "sum" will always be only a sum of one value ... while the "rollup" will give you the total of all those individual gifts.

3. Reports Can Request Variable User Fields

So you've got a report that's just the right framework of columns and rows, and you're thinking ... dang, I have to rebuild this any time I want to see an updated set of numbers?

In fact, you do not have to rebuild it.

Reports can be built to request user input of variables every time they are run -- for instance, a date, or a date range. To do this,

1. Under the "Conditions" tab, select the field you'll want to vary each time you run the report
2. Select an operator -- "Equals" is the default, but you might want "Less Than," "Greater Than," or others.
3. Leave the "Value" field empty.
4. Change the "Value type" field to "User Variable."
5. In "Variable Label", enter human-readable text that will prompt the person running report on what kind of information to enter. For instance, if the condition is built on the Transaction_Date field, the Variable label might be "Enter the date here".
6. Use the (+) button and "Add OR condition" buttons to add as many different user-submitted condition entries as you like. These can be freely combined with fixed conditions.

4. Reports Can Be Set to Run on a Schedule

No matter how polished and buffed your report, it still needs a human being to run it ... and in any given busy week (to say nothing of those spent on the beach), that step can easily slip the mind.

No problem.

Salsa reports can not only be run by hand, but can be set to run automatically and email the results on a scheduled basis. To set one up,

1. Place the system report on one of your dashboard pages.
2. Hit "Full Report" to run it.
3. Click "Export" in the lower right-hand corner of the report results page.
4. Under "export to a file, or schedule an export," click "Export Options".
5. Set the "run and export this report" field to "on a schedule".
6. Select a start time for the first report to run.
7. Select the run frequency from the "Run the report" menu.
8. Select one or more (comma-delimited) email addresses to receive the reports.

The other fields on this page -- a custom header, optional include fields, compressed files -- are strictly optional.

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