Tableau Test Drive for Raiser's Edge Reporting - The First Worksheet

This is part III in our series of looking at Tableau as our RE reporting solution.  You can see the other posts in the links below:
Part I - Installing Tableau
Part II - Connecting To RE and Planning our Dashboards

Now that we are connected to The Raiser's Edge with Tableau and have a dataset to work with in our workbook, lets focus on building out some of these reports.  Lets choose to focus on the report that breaks down the number of records by their Primary Constituent Code and where they are located.

First, lets select to create a new worksheet.  Now we are presented with an environment to be able to configure our worksheet to communicate a story about our data.  We can see that we have a list of fields (dimensions and measures) by which to slice and dice our data.  We can select different types of visualizations (charts, etc.) easily with the click of a mouse.  All this can be created with a pretty slick drag-and-drop functionality embedded in the software.

Our first worksheet 's"development" environment

Now that we have our worksheet development environment ready to go, lets play around with some configurations.  So we said that we want to report on the number of records by primary constituent code.  So the first step is lets include the measure of "Record ID".  With the selection of this measure we need to be sure that we configure it to count the number of Records.  If we had selected something like summary instead our numbers would be off as it would add up the actual IDs, not count them to get a record count.  I dropped the count of Record IDs into the row section.  I want my counts to be in a vertical format, not horizontal.  If I wanted them to go from left-to-right (horizontal) I would have dropped this measure into the Columns section.

Added the count of Record IDs as my measure

As we noted in our initial goal, we want to see where these records are located.  Lets start at Country to see where we can get a breakdown of the number of records based on Country.  To do this I drag the Country column to the Columns section above our graph.  Another note is that I have selected a bar graph to represent this data.  After dropping this Country column, you can see that we have a list of 3 countries (really 2 as some records have a "null" country meaning that there is not a Country value in this field on the preferred address) where our records are located.  From this graph we can easily see that most of our records are located in the United States.  Alone, this could be valuable information if all someone cared about was the Country.

We now have Country from the preferred address added to our worksheet

We also mentioned that we wanted to see where our records are located broken down by primary constituent code.  Our view contained the primary constituent code, which is the first constituent code in the list on the Bio 2 tab of a constituent record.  We dragged our Primary CC (Constituent Code) dimension field to the rows section.  And bam, we now have, across rows, each of our constituent codes and we can see where each of the records are, per constituent code.  Really easy.

We then took it a couple more steps farther.  We added the Region dimension to the Columns section and now we can see the Country and Region for our records per primary constituent code.  Finally, I wanted to add another bit of information in a different way than column or row.  So I dragged the State dimension to the Color section.  What we are then presented with is a color coding, within the chart of our states and the corresponding number of records per primary constituent code, country, and region, as well as state now.

If we had a significant number of records, which most RE customers are going to have, and not this small sample database, this worksheet chart/graph would really come to life.  This one looks a bit empty but it conveys a heck of a lot of information and we were able to do it very easily.

Something that this chart quickly points out is that most of our records don't have a region.  If region is important then perhaps I want to duplicate the report and add state so I can begin to see which states have a null region.  This allows me to visually begin to recognize how I might need to update my data so I can accurately report on Region, but also perhaps fix a process or system integration that is populating this region column.  Maybe I need to create a new process to "automagically" populate this field in the Raiser's Edge.

We could continue to extend this worksheet in multiple ways. The view from RE pulls all records, not just constituents.  So we could add a filter to have the user select to show all records, or just constituent records.  We could also add a filter for country to only show the US or any of the other geographic dimension fields that we have.

The point is that we built a potentially powerful worksheet/chart/report in a matter of minutes and it was all really easy to do.  We can create this type of analysis on nearly any type of information in The Raiser's Edge.