Using Cross Filters on Reports

Have you ever had a need to search for something that hasn’t happened or doesn’t exist? An example of this is people that have volunteered in your organization but have not donated. If so, the Cross Filtering in Salesforce reports allow you to do this.

Salesforce with the Nonprofit Success Pack comes with hundreds of reports out of the box and an easy to use report building tool. While those are great, users often get confused about how to find things that are not in the data – that’s where Cross Filtering comes in.

Without Cross Filters, Salesforce reports only find things that exist:

• Find all contacts who have volunteered and have donated.
• Find contacts with an email address but have never been on an email campaign.
• Find the primary contacts for organizations with donations.

With Cross Filters, Salesforce can find what doesn’t exist:

• Find all contacts who have volunteered but have never donated.
• Find contacts with an email address but have never been on an email campaign.
• Find organizations with donations but without primary contact.

How to Add a Cross Filter to a Report

Adding a cross filter is quite simple, once you’ve done it. 🙂

Let’s create the report to “Find all contacts who have volunteered but have never donated.” Your development team will definitely want to communicate with these people as they already engage with your organization.

1. Click on Reports in the top menu and click on “New Reports.”
2. Choose the Report Type “Contacts and Accounts” and click continue.
3. Click on “Filters” and choose “Add Cross Filter”
   
4. Choose Contacts “Without” “Opportunities” to find all contacts that do not have any opportunities and click Apply.
   
5. To complete this report also include the filters:
   • Volunteer hours > 0; to ensure only volunteers are included
   • Primary Contact equals True; to choose only primary contacts for the Account.The results of the filters look like:
     
6. Finally, run the report and ensure the results make sense and then save it.
   • Note, when testing, I included the total volunteer hours and total gifts to ensure the report made sense. Once the testing was complete, I removed those fields.

If you need help with this type of report or any other type of report, please email your support email address.