Analytics April: The Reporting Process

Welcome to Analytics April! We have a lot of things to say about reporting in Salesforce, so we're doing a short series of posts on the topic. Today, we're stepping back to look at the big picture: How do you approach creating a report from scratch?

We’ve hosted a conference for our customers for the last three years, and we keep track of the attendees using Campaigns, Contacts, and Accounts in Salesforce.

We're in the planning process for the 2016 Community Meeting right now, so a bunch of us were working together to pull some data about repeat vs. unique attendance. Nathan, Claire, and Michelle were trying to find out the number of people who had attended the conference in 2014 and 2015, and how many of those people had actually come to both (so, people who were part of the Campaigns for 2014 or 2015 conferences, or both).

Our first pass at running a report for this resulted in hilariously incorrect numbers. Even though we knew there were a bunch of people who had attended both prior conferences, our report made it seem as if the number of repeat attendees was zero.

Luckily, we were able to spot the wrong-ness of the results right away… and while we worked on fixing it together, and brought in Alli for some extra assistance, we realized our experience would be useful to share on this blog!

"i don't need the report, i need you to remember the experience"

Here are some thoughts about running reports, and the process of checking you own work as you go:

Think ahead about what an accurate report might look like

Before you even run your report, take a moment to visualize what the outcome should be. In our case, we didn't exactly think ahead, but we were paying enough attention to notice that we were not successfully reporting on unique attendance because the total number of people in the report was too high.

So if you're trying report on the progress of this year’s annual fund, you should already have a ballpark estimate of what that number should be. If your organization has never raised more than $500k in a year before, and your report shows $2m, that might be awesome? But you also might have a reporting problem.

Or if your venue has 538 seats and you know your average ticket price is $30, a report that shows you 200 tickets sold for a total of $500 in revenue should catch your eye. Check your reporting work first, before freaking out at the box office manager or accusing the marketing manager of putting out too many discount codes in the field!

Know your data structure

In order to troubleshoot an inaccurate report, you have to understand how the objects relate to each other for the specific scenario. In our case, we had to recognize that we weren't just looking for Campaign Members of those Campaigns -- we needed to filter on the Campaign Member Status as well, and also make sure the Contacts belonged to an Account that was actually a PatronManager client org, and lastly use a "power of 1" formula to get at the number of unique attendees across both campaigns.

For fundraising reporting, the more you know about the relationship between Contacts, Contact Roles, and Donations, the better off you'll be. (Look at the Schema Builder if you need help visualizing how all the pieces fit together.)

connections!

And don't forget about Report Types!  You could be missing data entirely if you aren’t using the right report type. Most Contact-based reports, for example, use the standard Accounts and Contact report type -- so if for some reason you have Contacts that are not associated with Accounts, you’ll be completely leaving them out of the picture -- which might be the right thing to do! But only if you know that you're doing it on purpose.

Collaboration is always good

Again, we knew our report was wrong right away -- we know there were repeat attendees in there somewhere. But beyond that, we didn’t really have an immediate educated guess as to what was going on. It was only by staying on the phone and talking to each other that we realized each of the fixes.

As an admin, you know a lot about the working of your Salesforce/PatronManager account, but you might not always know all the details of the work itself. Alli isn't part of the core conference committee, so they didn't have the same real-life understanding of how we were tracking attendance. And Nathan, Claire, and Michelle knew that part, but needed Alli's fresh eyes in order to construct a report that took everything into account.

7 Things I Learned in Trailhead (so far!)

(this is a post from Michelle about stuff she's been doing mostly without Alli!)

If you're reading this blog you've probably heard of Trailhead, the new interactive learning platform from Salesforce. I've been working my way through the various trails and modules over the past 10 months (39 badges earned as of this writing!), and as I go, I've kept track of some of the specific "aha" moments I've had -- tiny bits of new knowledge that have come up in the middle of an otherwise-familiar subject. (Certainly there have also been big new things I've learned, like everything about Lightning, but this post is just about those little unexpected moments.)

Password Lockout Messages

You can customize certain messages that appear when users reset their passwords, or when they're locked out from Salesforce entirely. The "Message" and "Help Link" sections of this article describe how this works.

probably this isn't the message you'd actually use

Roles as a List View

I had no idea that it was possible to view the Roles page as anything other than the "tree" view -- which is a good way to look at the hierarchy if you actually have a lot of roles and you need to see the relationship between them, but if your Roles setup is simple and you're trying to make sure than everyone has one, the "list view" option is way easier to navigate.

list>  tree

Schema Builder!

There are three amazing things about Schema Builder that I didn't know because I never really looked at it closely again after it was released! (I use it all the time, but I knew the basics and apparently never… opened my eyes? again? after a while?)

1) You can toggle between displaying object and field labels vs their names.

so many custom objects

2) You can use the "Select From" dropdown to filter the list of objects that are displayed in the sidebar. Try picking "Selected Objects" and you'll get a list of just the things you've already put on the screen.

so convenient

3) If you've ever added objects to the layout and then spent the next three minutes chasing them around the screen and dragging them into place… try clicking "Auto-Layout button instead next time.

Chatter Auto-Following

I would love for everyone in the universe (and PatronManager clients in particular) to use Chatter much more than they currently do. I thought this fact was interesting for small organizations as a built-in way to jumpstart Chatter adoption:

"When you turn on Chatter for your company ...if your company has less than 16 Chatter users, all users automatically follow each other and up to 25 most recently used records."

Hilarity

The whole Trailhead team has a GREAT sense of humor. My personal favorite joke appears in the Event Monitoring module:

Let’s consider one of the example cases from earlier. A sales representative named Rob Burgle left your company a few weeks ago and joined a major competitor. All of a sudden, you start losing deals to this other company. You suspect that Mr. Burgle downloaded a report containing confidential lead information and shared it with his new employer.