Tableau Test Drive for Raiser's Edge Reporting - A Bit of a Deeper Dive into Demographic Reporting

In the final post in this little series, I am taking a deeper dive into reporting on other demographics using Tableau.  You can check out the other posts in this series below:

Part I - Installing Tableau
Part II - Connecting To RE and Planning our Dashboards
Part III - Our First Worksheet
Part IV - Worksheet Map

As I mention above, this post will focus on taking more demographic information from The Raiser's Edge, such as Deceased or Inactive, and exploring how we might report on this information in Tableau.  First we are creating a new worksheet.  We drag and drop the Deceased dimension into the Columns section and Primary CC (Constituent Code) into the Rows section.  Then we drag the Count of Record IDs into the table to report on the number of records.  Great, we can see which constituent codes are marked as Deceased (-1) or Not Deceased (0).  This could be valuable information if we saw that we had some key constituent code with a record marked as deceased.

Basic worksheet showing deceased/not deceased count by constituent code

Well, for a non-technical person have Deceased values of 0 or -1 is not very user-friendly.  But these values are what is stored in The Raiser's Edge database.  Tableau offers the capability to change how this is presented.  I have changed these values to No or Yes, which to a "business" user is much easier to understand.

Change 0 and -1 Deceased values to No and Yes

Now that we are reporting on the number of records marked as Deceased.  Now lets use another key bit of information to the Columns section: whether or not a record is Inactive.  This will allow us to see, for each Deceased record whether or not there are any records still marked as Active, which seems to be at odds.

Adding Inactive RE dimension to the report

As I begin thinking about visualizing the data in the worksheet I realized that I should have flipped what is in the Columns and Rows section.  Thankfully Tableau has a button that does this automatically.  Wow, that was easy and a nifty little feature.  Well, you might be saying that all good visualization tools should do that, and you would be right; but Tableau does have it so someone was  thinking about usability when they pushed for this feature.

Columns and Rows flipped at the click of a button

Now that we have some data, lets begin exploring visualization.  I am selecting a bar graph first.  We are then able to quickly see, based on the length of the bars which constituent codes are Active/Inactive and Deceased/Not Deceased.

Bar graph for the count of records per constituent code that are Active/Deceased

Next lets use a Treemap.  This is another way to quickly see how the various counts for each constituent code, deceased, and inactive combination relates to the total.  This makes it easy to see not only which combinations have the highest counts, but the proportion against the total number of records.  Pretty cool.

Treemap for the demographic data

After considering these first two options, I decided to go back to the bar graph.  I thought it might be useful to add some color so that I can see what the Information Source for the preferred address for each of the combinations of demographics in the bar graph.  I can quickly see that most of my constituents don't have an Information Source recorded.  This would be concerning to me as I likely want to be able to see where our constituents are coming from and how we are acquiring this information so that I can identify how trustworthy that information may be. Pretty impactful and pretty easy to do as well.

Bar Graph now with color coding for Information Source for preferred address

In this series we focused on giving Tableau a test drive on reporting against some Raiser's Edge data.  I focused on demographic data for our records (constituents and relationships).  What I found was how easy it was to use the Tableau Desktop software to build worksheets and dashboards from a quick test drive.

In order for someone to use Tableau it would like require a pretty technical resource that can build some backend tools such as database views, to allow for the dynamic reporting that your organization may require.  But once that is in place, developing the actual worksheets and dashboards was pretty intuitive.  A savvy person could come up to speed with the basic ins and outs of Tableau in a day or two.  All in all, I think Tableau could be valuable for the non-profit community to use as a reporting tool for The Raiser's Edge.