Detailed Reporting
Powerful Search & Reporting
CiviCRM is designed to help nonprofits make data-driven decisions through its comprehensive search and reporting capabilities. With customizable options, dozens of built-in reports, and a new search platform, CiviCRM’s toolset empowers organizations to analyze their data and gain valuable insights, anticipate challenges and adjust strategies, and, ultimately, sustain and demonstrate their impact.
CiviCRM’s search and reporting capabilities are essential for any nonprofit looking to leverage data to drive their mission forward.
CiviReport: Built-In Reports, Customizable Templates
Out of the box, CiviCRM offers dozens of built-in reports that meet the needs of most nonprofits, covering key areas of operation including fundraising, membership, events, contact management and more.
The built-in reports can be modified in the interface such that organizations can easily make adjustments and drill down into their data effectively. Report data can be displayed in charts and tables, and can be exported for external formatting, sharing or use in 3rd party business intelligence systems.
Customizable reports offer the flexibility to tailor your data insights to match your specific needs or those of your organization. By selecting specific metrics, filters, and visualizations, you can focus on the most relevant information, analyze patterns and uncover valuable insights.
Whether you are looking to track key performance indicators, compare trends over time, or analyze specific segments of your data, customizable reports allow you to easily customize your analysis and make more informed decisions. With personalized reports, you can gain a deeper understanding of your data and drive actionable results for your organization.
Likewise, reports can be restricted based on the user role, shared automatically, emailed out at pre-established intervals to specific individuals and added as a widget to your CiviCRM dashboard, thereby maintaining information at your fingertips.
All reports in CiviCRM are based on a set of default templates. In addition to modifying the default reports, organizations can build entirely new reports off of these templates and share them accordingly. This enables nonprofits to build out the exact reports they need instead of modifying a small handful back and forth to get the desired insights.
CiviCRM’s default report template set can be enhanced via extensions, such as Extended Reports, that add new templates and new reporting capabilities to an already robust reporting engine. And, given that CiviCRM is open source, organizations are free to add in their own custom-developed reports and templates at any time.
With a wide range of report templates available, you can easily access the information you need in a clear and concise format, allowing you to cater your analysis to specific areas of interest, whether it be the financial health of the organization or the effectiveness of community outreach programs.
Searching Within CiviCRM
“Search” within CiviCRM is considered separate from reporting in that it’s often done not for the purpose of reporting but for finding, managing or otherwise segmenting your data such that you can take a specific action on it. Reporting is simply one action that you can take on your data, but so too is grouping contacts, sending emails, assigning activities, etc.
In this way, CiviCRM’s search capabilities are used to identify those contacts on which you want to take some action.
In CiviCRM, you have a few options depending on your exact needs. In many cases, a very simple search is all that’s required to find the specific contact or group of contacts you’re looking for. In other scenarios, you may need to overlay various criteria to drill down into the exact pool of contacts you seek. In both cases, CiviCRM has you covered, affording you a great deal of flexibility directly in the interface to search for and find the intended data set.
CiviCRM takes it a step further by providing several custom searches that give you additional capabilities such as include/exclude, geographical search, and searches using on-
the-fly calculations.
Using CiviCRM’s built-in search capabilities empowers organizations to accurately identify, segment and manage their database of contacts. Moreover, it supports “smart grouping” whereby contacts can come into or exit from a group when their details change consistent with the search’s parameters. This is a powerful automation that ensures that your data stays clean, up to date and actionable, saving you time and allowing you to focus on strategic tasks rather than getting bogged down in administrative work.
Effective search and segmentation empowers organizations to create and benefit from more personalized and effective communication strategies. This targeted approach leads to stronger, more meaningful relationships with supporters.
Supercharge Your Mission
CiviCRM’s search and reporting tools are highly practical and applicable to the day-to-day operations of nonprofits and are indispensable for organizations aiming to maximize their impact through data-driven decision-making.
Fundraising reports can track donor contributions, analyze trends, and identify top supporters, providing valuable insights that can inform your fundraising strategies and enhance community engagement. Saved searches save time, create efficiencies and empower automations within your dataset to keep it clean, efficient and actionable. Finally, full access to all of your data via reports and via comprehensive search promotes transparency, trust and accountability, allowing you to better align your CRM with your operational objectives.
By combining built-in reports, customizable templates, and advanced search functionalities, you can analyze your organization’s financial information alongside other crucial metrics such as donor engagement and fundraising outcomes.
This holistic approach to data analysis ensures that all areas of your nonprofit’s performance are monitored and optimized, and that your organization’s strategies and initiatives are grounded in solid evidence, leading to more effective and impactful outcomes.
SearchKit: A New Era in Search & Reporting
As powerful and flexible as CiviCRM’s search and reporting capabilities are, they are currently being overhauled to make room for a new engine known as “SearchKit”. The reason? To take search and reporting to a whole new level.
Let’s face it, organizations today manage a lot of complexities and decisions must be made using as much accurate data as possible. SearchKit unifies the central search and reporting engines in CiviCRM and allows organizations to identify, parse and analyze their data to a much more granular degree.
Likewise, SearchKit searches can be saved, permissioned specifically, and placed in target areas of the user interface such that your users have the exact search and reporting tools they need to manage the data that’s pertinent to their role in your organization.
By consolidating all of the various built-in searches, SearchKit simplifies the user interface while providing users a more powerful, more relevant utility to manage their data and to perform mission-critical analysis.
What’s more is that SearchKit searches can be used to display data on the public portion of your website, thereby allowing site visitors to access, view and filter data that you share. This empowers stakeholders to learn about your organization and its performance, builds trust by fostering openness and transparency, and ultimately showcases your organization’s impact.
SearchKit is actively in production and is increasingly used by organizations in the wild. It is constantly evolving to meet the complex needs of today’s high performing nonprofit organizations and to provide a level of precision and analysis that supersedes CiviCRM’s already impressive default search and reporting capabilities.