Advanced training on the Salsa reporting tool

Custom reports are another task we get asked about all the time. And when PowerThru needs help with reporting, we turn to Jon Wheeler. Jon’s an expert at salsa reports, having worked at Salsa labs with some of their biggest and most complicated clients – folks like the AFLCIO, DCCC and more.

Here, Jon explains how to create one of the reports we use most often – tracking new signups by supporter code: Perfect for anyone who wants to know where their supporters are coming from, and welcome and communicate with them based on intake venue (Facebook, vs a list swap, vs an event signup)

1. Go to Reports Tab, click on Create a Custom Report
2. Set up the Properties of the Report.
   1. Give your report a name. Example: Signups by Month and Tracking Code
   2. Select Aggregate Report, since this is going to be a report that “aggregates together” statistics for a particular time period (a month) and grouped by a particular field (source tracking code)
   3. You can use the “Classic Object Chooser” and choose “Supporter,” since we are looking at something in the supporter record. Note that you could also create a similar report for Donations or Actions 2.0
   4. Click Save.
3. Click on the Columns tab to start setting up the fields in your report.
4. Choose the fields from the Supporter Table your report will be utilizing
   1. Date Created: the date supporter records are first created
   2. Source Tracking Code: the tracking code applied to the supporter’s record from the page they were ‘sourced’ from
   3. Supporter KEY: the unique identifier for each supporter created. We are going to “count” these keys in order to know how many records were created with each code for each month.
   4. Give each of the fields a Label
   5. Date Created = Month
   6. Source Tracking Code = Source Tracking Code
   7. Supporter KEY = Number of Supporters
   8. Apply a Function to the Date Created and Supporter KEY fields
   9. Date Created = Month
   10. Supporter KEY = Count
   11. Click the Group By box for Date Created and Source Tracking Code fields.
   12. Click Save to finish setting up the fields in your report.
5. Using the Conditions tab, you can set what time period the report is operating on
   1. Click “Add OR condition” button
   2. Select the “Date Created” field.
   3. Some options here include:
   4. Under “Function,” choose “In this month” to show the results for the current month
   5. Under “Function,” choose “In the current year” to show results for the current calendar year
   6. To have the report prompt you for a starting date, change the “Equal” option to “Greater Than or Equals”, “Value type” to “User Variable” and enter “Start Date” for a Variable Label.
6. Click Save when you are done setting Conditions.
   1. Using the Sort by tab you can control how the information is sorted
   2. On the first line, choose “Month” and set to order to “desc” (descending, latest month first)
   3. On the second line, choose “Count” and set order to “desc” (tracking code with the most supporters first
   4. Click Save when you are done setting Sort by order.
7. You can use the Filter tab to only show Source Tracking Codes with more than a certain number of signups
   1. Click Add Filter
   2. Select Field “Number of Supporters,” Operator “Greater Than” and a value (i.e. 10 to only show Source Tracking Codes with more than 10 supporters).
   3. Click Save when you are done setting Filters.
8. Click “Run Report” to run your report. It should look something like this:

Note you can change the number next to “Results per page” to show more results per screen.