Rock U - Reporting - Reporting Strategy

Transcribed Video Content

One off data views can pile up quick without a plan. So we'll talk about how you can build a base data view and build on top of it to keep your data views organized and easy to maintain. Let's illustrate what makes up a solid reporting strategy using a diagram. So what this is showing is data views and reports. Those are two of the most important parts of reporting in Rock, and you start with the data views to get back the rows that you want. Then later you use reports to add columns and be able to easily sort and get the exact information that you want. Now, data views, what we're going to do is rather than having one data view that solves a bunch of problems at once, we'll have many small data views that we can chain together to get specific info, and that will mean it's so much easier for us to make changes and create new data views because we're using building blocks. For example, you could use the adult member and attendees data view to get back just our members and attendees. Then you can split that by females and males. And from there, you could have data views that are using the female or male data view and showing just people in certain age ranges. And that will mean that later on when you go to make reports, you can get really specific about who you're showing without having had made a data view that will become a black box and you can never use the components again. Then you can create multiple reports off of one data view to display different information. So you're always displaying the info that you need, but you're getting that info in a more sustainable way by stacking these data views and then eventually making a report off of it, again of which you can make multiple reports to show the information that you actually want to see. A thoughtful reporting strategy means you build a data view once and you can use it in multiple places, making things easier for you and saving you some time.