Analysis for fundraising and membership teams.

A supporter who gives every year under three records looks like three supporters who each gave once and left. Every duplicate turns one retained donor into two lapsed ones, and the error compounds each year the file grows.

So resolve identity before counting anything, and report how many records collapsed alongside the rate. That second number is the size of the correction, and it is usually the more persuasive figure in the room.

A cancelled monthly gift and a declined card look identical in a totals report and need opposite responses: one is a re-acquisition campaign, the other is a phone call.

Look at what happened in the three days before each gap started. Payment failures cluster, often in processor batches, and a cluster is recoverable in a way that genuine lapse is not.

Income that grew while becoming dependent on eleven households is a worse year than it looks, and the board is entitled to know which it was.

Report the top one, five and ten together rather than a single threshold, and put an end date against any pledge, because a pledge in its final year and a renewing relationship look identical in a share-of-income chart.

The gift transactions with dates, amounts and a donor reference, and the constituent records with whatever identity fields exist: email, name, address. Retention cannot be computed on people without the second file.

Any CRM that exports a spreadsheet works, and column names differ by system and by year, so there is no need to rename anything first. What matters is that soft credits are distinguishable from hard credits, or a matched gift gets counted twice.