Find, Format, and Customize NPSP Reports

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

List the standard Reports NPSP offers.
Explain how Salesforce reports are organized.
Run a standard NPSP Report.
Find and customize an NPSP Report.

Data Power

The staff at No More Homelessness (NMH) is excited to learn from the data they’ve been collecting in Salesforce. They have a lot of questions about their programs and fundraising efforts, and they’re eager to gain insight into what’s working and what’s not. With Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) reports and dashboards, you can compare, evaluate, dissect, and categorize data to answer questions like:

Which fundraising campaign raised the most revenue this year?
Who are NMH’s top donors or donor prospects?
How long does each stage of a program at NMH typically take?
How many NMH clients achieved program outcomes or goals?
How is each of NMH’s programs helping the organization meet its mission?

Wow, when you’ve been collecting and maintaining quality data (which we’ve learned is critical to organizational success), we can answer so many important questions. It used to take the team days to figure out the answers to these questions, but now that all their data is digital and in one place (namely: Salesforce), they can find answers quickly with reports. To see how NMH does this, we’ll follow NMH’s development team as they use NPSP’s reporting features to evaluate their fundraising progress and efforts. But first, let’s check in with the NMH programs team for a quick tour of the reports page to learn how Salesforce organizes reports.

A Tour of the Reports Page

Anthony Hall, NMH’s Program Manager, has been working on evaluating inventory sources for personal toiletry kits in the food pantry. Anthony wants to make sure that the organization is responsibly managing their purchasing and donation requests with the actual client needs. It’s a difficult task because the demand for different toiletry kit types can vary unexpectedly, but Anthony thinks he can find the reports needed to inform his analysis.

After signing in to his account and navigating to NMH’s custom Market & Pantry app with the App Launcher ( The app launcher icon. ), Anthony clicks Reports from the navigation bar and automatically lands on the Recent reports (1) page. From this view, each row represents an individual report. Anthony can see the Report Name, Folder, Description, and a few other columns, but these can be customized by an admin so you may see something a little different. No matter what columns are there, you can click a header (2) to sort.

If Anthony sees what he’s looking for, he can click an individual Report Name (3) to navigate to the report itself. He can also use the dropdown arrow on a row (4) for quick access to a number of actions he can take on a report, including Edit, Run, Export, Delete, and even Move a report to another folder (depending on his permissions). Exploring the page a bit more, Anthony sees sections for Reports, Folders, and Favorites (5), each of which is a header to group different access and organizational options for reports.

The reports page

Anthony sees a report in the list that sounds like it could be what he’s looking for—Current Inventory Levels—so he clicks it to open it. Great work, Anthony! We’ll check back with Anthony a little later to see how he uses NPSP’s reporting functionality to create a new report. But, for now, let’s see how NMH’s development team uses NPSP’s out-of-the-box reporting functionality to help address its top fundraising questions.

NPSP Reports

Harnessing the power of Salesforce reports and dashboards to deliver more than 60 stakeholder and fundraising report templates, the NMH development team can address some of its most common nonprofit fundraising reporting needs. And they can also access the information they need to better understand where their organization is and where they can invest to be even more successful. Let’s follow NMH along with Sofia Rivera, NMH’s Development Associate, as she searches for a saved report in NPSP.

In NPSP, Sophia finds saved reports either by using Global Search or by clicking on the Reports tab. If she already knows the name of the report, she would select Reports from the menu and then enter the report's name in the Global Search box.

“LYBUNT” is typed into the Global Search showing a list of recently accessed “Last Year But Unfortunately Not This” fundraising reports. If she doesn't know the name of the report or she wants to create a new report, she would click on the Reports tab. (And if you don't see the Reports tab, go to the AppLauncher on the left side and enter 'Reports' in the search bar to find and select this view.)

The Reports tab in the navigation bar and the All Folders section which houses NPSP Reports.

Sofia then clicks All Folders to see NPSP Report folders. The NPSP Constituent Reports folder includes Contact, Organization, and Membership reports. The NPSP Fundraising folder includes a variety of reports to help you understand your donations, grants, campaign ROI, general accounting unit allocations, expected revenue, and more.

Sofia can use these reports straight out-of-the-box or customize them to meet NMH’s specific reporting needs.

Run a Standard NPSP Report

As NMH’s awesome Development Associate, one of Sofia’s many responsibilities is keeping her team updated on their fundraising progress. Like many nonprofits, NMH relies on donations from individuals and families as a significant part of its revenue mix. It has a stable pool of reliable donors that it communicates with through a variety of mechanisms, including email and direct mail. NMH Executive Director, Kim Friedman, reminds her staff regularly that it’s far easier to keep an existing donor than to cultivate a new one. Yet, towards the end of the year, she notices that revenue from individual and household giving is a bit under budget. Kim wants to better understand what’s going on, so she asks Sofia to pull a report of household accounts that gave last year but haven't yet given this year.

Follow along as Sofia prepares her report:

Open the Reports tab. Click All Folders. Then click the NPSP Fundraising Reports folder to see if there is an out-of-the-box NPSP report that can help.
The Account LYBUNT (Last Year But Unfortunately Not This Year) report sounds promising. Open the report by clicking the Account LYBUNT title.
Double check the report filters by clicking Edit and then Filters. The filters show that you are looking at ALL accounts whose Total Gifts Last Year were greater than 0 (i.e. gave last year), AND whose Total Gifts This Year are less than 0 (i.e. didn't give this year).

This is exactly what Sofia needs!

Sofia clicks Save As to save this report with a new name and then sends the link to her Executive Director and Director of Development. Together, the team decides to run a special campaign to reach out to the donors listed on the LYBUNT report. They'll go back to this report to segment the donors by giving level and put together an engagement strategy for each level of donor.

Customize an NPSP Report

You can also use NPSP reports as a starting point to find answers to other questions your organization may want to answer.

For example, NMH has a core group of supporters who donate both their time and money, and the organization would like to recognize these special donor-volunteers who go the extra mile. Sofia knows that NMH tracks its volunteers internally using an app called Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S), which is separate from NPSP. V4S includes custom fields to track the number of hours each volunteer gives, and those fields can be used as filters in a standard NPSP report to find how many contacts gave both time and money.

Let's follow along as Sofia tackles this challenge.

Open the Reports tab, click All Folders, and click the NPSP Fundraising Reports folder.
The Contacts with Giving Totals report sounds close to what Sofia is looking for, so she'll use it as a starting point.
Check the filters by clicking Edit and then Filters. The report is filtered on Total Gifts greater than $0.00, which gives Sofia a complete view of all NMH donors.
Customize the report by adding a filter for Volunteer Hours greater than 0 to see all contacts who are both donors and volunteers. Add that column to the report using the Outline tab. (If you don't have V4S installed in your Salesforce org or Trailhead Playground you won't see the Volunteer Hours field.)
Run the report and take a look.
Use the Save As button to save the new Donor and Volunteer report to the Private Reports folder

With minimal effort, Sofia is able to adapt an existing NPSP report to get the specific answer she needed.

As we mentioned, NPSP comes with more than 60 fundraising and stakeholder reports designed to help you answer some (though not all) of the burning questions you want your data to answer. If you can’t use an existing report or customize a standard report, you can create a new one. Next up, we’ll check back in with the NMH programs team to see how they use Report Builder to do just that.

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