Chapter 13. Telling Your Story – Building Reports

We've spent the last twelve chapters exploring the many ways we can capture and store information about constituents, work with contact records, perform bulk actions on records, create forms, expose data on our site, and build multidimensional depth in our organization's data.

With this increasing breadth of information, our next goal is to retrieve and display our data through reports. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Discussing the purpose, terminology, and basic concepts of CiviCRM reports

• Reviewing the tools available for generating and publishing reports

• Putting these tools in context within your organization

Getting to the bottom line

What is a report?

Okay, this may seem like a trite question. However, we ask it with sincerity: What is a report? When the Executive Director, Membership Committee Chair, Fundraising Consultant, Board Secretary, or Staff Supervisor in the next cubicle asks you for a report, what are they expecting to receive? What makes a report different from a set of records exported from search results?

Reports present data with a message. More than raw data and more than just a subset of records, reports are meant to tell a story. We can begin to understand their purpose by comparing them to search results. They are similar, but differ in several important ways:

• Reports are more specialized in the types of data that can be filtered, and the way in which that data is rendered.

• Reports are intended for more visual uses, whereas a search result yields a simple list of data, which can be exported or acted upon in other ways. A report may present results with a header, footer, and more...

Toolsets and timing

Reports are accessed from the main navigation menu, and by default are organized into submenus by the type of data they are working with. Within the reporting tool, we have two important concepts to understand: report templates and report instances:

• Report templates define the features of a report. This includes what fields are available to the report, options for grouping and filtering, display choices (tabular, bar/pie chart), and any other options available.

• Report instances are a saved set of criteria and options you have selected for a specific template. For example, you may want to view a constituent summary report, displaying all contacts in Group A. At a later time, you may create a second instance of the constituent summary report displaying all contacts in Group A and Group B. Report instances are often just referred to as reports.

What's important to understand from these terms is that a single template may be used to create multiple report instances. Many times...

Saving and working with reports

After you've created a new report or modified an existing report, you will generally want to save it. If you click on Preview Report, the report will be refreshed with whatever new settings and criteria you've made. This is important to ensure that the filters and columns you've selected are indeed what you intended. If this is a new report, you will have the Create Report option for creating the reports (after first previewing it). If it is an existing report, you can click on Update Report (saving over the existing instance), or Save a Copy, which will save a new report with the selected name.

Tip

Understand that updating a report will save whatever new settings you have selected, overwriting the previous selections. These new configuration settings will impact everyone who uses the report. If you suspect this report is used by other staff, you may want to review the changes with them before you save them, or consider creating a new report rather than modifying...

Available templates

CiviCRM ships with over 45 report templates, covering everything from constituent lists, bookkeeping reports, event participation, memberships, and case review. The following list, organized by the CiviCRM component, provides a brief description of each template available at the time of writing this book.

Note

Note that new report templates are continuously added to the system; review the list on the Create New Report from Template page for a description of reports available with your current version. Also investigate the extension directory to look for additional reports that may be available.

Contact report templates

The contact report templates are as follows:

• Constituent Report (Summary): This template provides a list of addresses and contact information for constituent records.

• Constituent Report (Detail): This template provides contact-related information on contributions, memberships, events, and activities.

• Activity Report: This template provides a list of constituent...

Customizing and building your own templates

Though the reports that ship with CiviCRM seek to anticipate the bulk of your potential reporting needs, it is possible that you may have needs not addressed by existing report templates.

While it is beyond the scope of this book to delve into specific details regarding the development of new report templates, it is important to note that the report tools anticipate these needs. The code to build templates is very self-contained, modularized, and somewhat more accessible to beginner programmers than other areas of the software. You still need some familiarity with PHP and the MySQL database in order to build your own report template, but you may find it easier to work with than other areas of the CiviCRM code base.

If you are interested in exploring this further, visit the following online documentation for guidance on creating a template: https://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC46/Create+a+Report-Template+Extension.

Summary

Let's circle back to the original premise set forth at the beginning of this chapter: a report is primarily about telling a story—it is data with a message.

We began this chapter thinking about what a report truly is, and guarding ourselves against missing the forest while staring at trees. After having reviewed the mechanics of creating and working with reports and outlining the various report templates available, it would be easy to lose sight of this broader context.

The reporting tools covered in this chapter are a means to an end. You will select your report fields, define data filters, and choose your display options with the goal of communicating to other staff, organization leaders, or yourself the story of your constituents. This story takes shape through the lens of activities, contributions, pledges, memberships, events, cases, grants, or other windows into your data.

In this chapter, we set the context for working with reports and understanding the goal of reporting, and...