The Raiser's Edge Financial Dashboard Part V - How to Extend It Further

OK, so we have picked apart the Tucamino Solutions Raiser's Edge Financial Dashboard application a bit.  Great, so what.  Well, you may download it and give it a try and say to yourself "This is the best reporting application ever for The Raiser's Edge!!!".  OK, probably not, but you may say "you know what, this is actually pretty cool and it shows great information, but I wish it could _____________".  Thats OK.  No application, report, or dashboard is perfect. 

What we have provided is a foundation for an application that can be used out of the box and provide great information.  However, it is also designed in a way that it can be extended very easily.  What do you mean by "extending" it further?  Well, that simply means that we have a core platform or baseline to add new functionality.  Here are some ways to add new functionality:

1.  Change the actual dashboard components.  Perhaps you want to look at Raiser's Edge gift trends over 5 years, or want to show a chart based on a Constituent's or Gift's constituent code. 
2.  Add new drill-down reports.  You may need additional detailed reports that we can add for you to drill-down into more detailed. Perhaps it deals with Pledges or Recurring Gifts, or even Proposals and Actions.
3.  Add filtering and other configuration options.  As mentioned in the posts, this dashboard component only focuses on cash gifts (cash, pay-cash, etc.), but perhaps you want stocks and gift-in-kind included.  In addition, maybe you want each user that uses the application to be able to filter based on other data (constituency, solicitors, etc.).
4.  Create a whole new application.  You may have a need for something completely different but want it in a similar format, displaying completely different information, or anything else you might think of.  Because we have a starting point, and we know The Raiser's Edge, we can quickly develop applications that you can use, minimizing the total cost to you because we have a head-start.

We offer discounts on customizing this application as we want to not only provide specific updates and new functionality for paying customers, but where we see the opportunity, we will include that new functionality in our FREE product for others to use.  We can't keep adding this functionality without your help.  We want to keep this product free for all.  So it is a win for the entire non-profit community when you use us for your Raiser's Edge customizations and other technology-related efforts.

Go check out our website to see what else we can do for you and even see what other products we might have.  At the very least go to our site and request your FREE download of our Raiser's Edge Financial Dashboard product and give it a spin and provide us some feedback.

Check out the other articles, coming soon, in our series:
The Raiser's Edge Financial Dashboard Part I - The Overview
The Raiser's Edge Financial Dashboard Part II - The Big Picture
The Raiser's Edge Financial Dashboard Part III - Drill-Down Analysis
The Raiser's Edge Financial Dashboard Part IV - True Integration with The Raiser's Edge