Using PivotTables to Analyze Your Donor Data

Data is power in the world of fundraising. And as more and more of your donors use GiveCampus to make their donations, you will have access to more and more data about who gave and the why, when, and how they made that gift. 

While your School Dashboard of GiveCampus has tons of pre-built charts and graphs you can use, sometimes you want to slice or dice your data in different ways. 

PivotTables Explained

PivotTables are a function within Microsoft Excel (and Google Sheets) to quickly summarize data and sort it by category to pull out interesting statistics and trends. 

Below are instructions on how to create a basic Pivot table (they can get quite complex!). To show the power of a basic Pivot Table, we are going to use GiveCampus’s default report to review different statistics for different campaigns.

*Note that at any time you can pull default reports to quickly pull the most relevant information about the gifts you’ve received through GiveCampus. Our tools also allow you to create custom reports so you can focus on the specifics that are most important to your school. 

Create a PivotTable

1. Pull a report on GiveCampus. Here, we just pulled a default report, but your default columns may differ.

2. Select all rows and columns of data, then click Insert and PivotTable

3. A window will appear, where you can confirm the below two items and then click “ok”

•  Select a table or range: By default, your entire table should be included, but if not, use your mouse to include all the relevant columns and rows in your table. 
• Choose where to place the PivotTable: Select if you would like the Pivot Table to appear on a new worksheet or an existing worksheet

4.  You will be taken to a new tab where your PivotTable is created! 

Configure a PivotTable

1. Once created, your PivotTable Fields will appear on the right. For basic PivotTables, we are only interested in Columns and Values.

2. If you would like to see the total number of unique donors per campaign, you can place “Campaign_name” in Rows. You can then put “Donation_ID” in Values and select "Count." This will tell the PivotTable to count how many unique IDs are in each campaign as seen below.

3. If you would like to see the total dollar amount raised for each campaign, you can place “Campaign_name” in Rows. Then put “donation_amount” in Value sections and select "Sum." This will now show the sum of the donation amounts per campaign.

4. If you’d like to see both of these breakdowns at the same time, keep “Campaign_name” in Rows and add both Count of “Donor_ID” and Sum of “Donation_Amount” in Values.

Additional Tips

Now that you understand how to create a basic PivotTable, think about what information would be most useful to you and your team. 

• Would it be helpful to know the breakdown of how many dollars were donated by affiliation? 
• Number of gifts per payment type? 
• Number of donors per class year? 
• Or perhaps total dollars by class year? 

If you’ve added custom fields a Giving Form and can pull the data in a custom GiveCampus report, the possibilities are endless about how you can slice and dice the data to analyze. 

Take some time practicing with PivotTables since they are easy to create but can be tricky to master. Then, set yourself loose to discover new insights about your donors!