Notes from the Programmers

We've been working with one of our clients to develop a new feature in Fundraising to automatically calculate and store a willingness/ability score in each account in the database. The new feature, called The Rating System, lets you define a list of criteria and assign a point value to each criterion. The score can be viewed on individual accounts and accessed by segmentation.

Our goals as developers were to make it flexible enough to allow each organization to define their own criteria based on what is important to them, take into account the different ways organizations store certain information, and include the ability to change the criteria.

Examples of criteria you might use include the length of membership/active status, joint membership accounts, sustaining giver, matching gifts, event attendance, and volunteer history. Each criterion is defined by one or multiple fields in a process similar to segmentation. As in segmentation, you can define which accounts you want to include based on account status. The big difference between segmentation and the Rating System is that segmentation allows an account to be in only one segment, but the Rating System allows an account to be in multiple categories. The score is then calculated and saved on the account in a user-defined Special Interest Field.

This new Rating System has been incorporated in to the Analysis Reports menu in Version 9.1 and has been in beta testing for about six months. We are in the process of developing the documentation, and in February will be presenting a webinar (see webinar links in the right column) on this new tool in conjunction with the station that helped developed it. We hope you are as excited about this new Fundraising feature as we are, as we believe this new tool will enable you to analyze your data like never before.

Archive your Analysis Reports so you can access them at a later date. You'll even have all of the features available to you for an archived report that you have for a freshly run report!

Many stations find it helpful to create a list of their clients and which programs their spots have been scheduled into, for internal tracking, public file purposes, and so on. Check out this month's Traffic tip video to learn how to create these reports, and add your own variations, too.