What is CiviReport?

CiviReport allows you to create, run and schedule reports based on the data CiviCRM has about your contacts and their interactions with your organisation. Many report templates are designed to work with a specific CiviCRM component, such as CiviContribute or CiviCase.

CiviCRM comes with a number of predefined report templates that are used to create reports. For example, the Membership Report template can be used to create a report that shows all student members that have joined your organisation within the past year.

CiviCRM's predefined report templates are built to satisfy the basic needs of non-profits and organisations. Each new version of CiviCRM will include further report templates, but if you can't find the right template for your requirement, you can extend CiviCRM by writing a new template yourself - and contribute it back to the CiviCRM community to share the benefit of your work.

Writing a new report template requires some PHP and SQL skills. A well-written template will be flexible enough to meet your specific needs as well as the needs of others. Techniques for developing report templates are explained in the section of this book which covers methods of extending and customising CiviCRM.

Real world scenarios

Reports help your organisation to evaluating its impact and achieve its mission. Here are some reports examples:

Evaluating turnout for an event

An organisation wants to attract young people to their annual 'Community Organising and Youth Leadership workshop'  They decide to announce the event three months in advance to ensure a good turnout. Lead staff or organisers will use the Event Participant Report throughout the registration process to determine if they need to do more outreach to attract m.

Here is a work flow describing how the organisation's staff will use this report.

1. A lead staff person uses pecific criteria, such as youths under the age of 25 based in the target area, to identify contacts to invite to the event.
   
2. Lead staff then email and phone the identified contacts to invite them to register and attend the event. 
3. During the three months before the event, a lead organiser views the Event Participant Report at the end of each week to see how many have registered and to determine what other strategies could be used to increase the turnout. The lead organiser may also want to know the roles of the participants, such as who and how many will be speakers or volunteers.
   
4. At the end of the event, the lead organiser will view the Event Participant Report again to see how many actually attended the event, as well as how many registered but didn't attend. Organisers may then want to follow up those contacts who registered but didn't attend, to determine whether there were any barriers to attending such as the cost of the event, lack of transportation or lack of interest in the topics scheduled for the workshop.

Determining total contributions for all people in a household

A non profit keeps records of individuals organised by households.  A common situation will be that the husband in the household has attended a numbe of paid events, and their wife has also registered for other events, and made seperate donations.

Staff at the organisation want to see the total contributions received from everyone in the household so that when someone calls the office to inquire about a donation or event payment made by someone else in the family, all the relevant information is at hand.  Staff run the Donation Summary Report (Household) and fill in the name of the household to find all contributions and find all relevant information and answer the caller's questions. 

Targeting a mailing for fundraising

Your organisation has launched a capital campaign to raise money for a new shelter. The development director wants to reach out to donors who made a large donation last year but haven't given money this year.

1. She creates an instance of the LYBUNT report ("Last year but not this year") which filters data to show people who gave more than 500 EUR last year.
2. She runs the report and uses the "Add to Group" button to put these donors in a new group.
3. Then she sends an email to everyone in the group with information about the capital campaign.
4. She adds the report to her CiviCRM Dashboard so she can review progress getting this group of prior donors to contribute to the campaign.