Creating Custom Reports from Scratch

Introduction

In this article, you will learn how to create a custom report from scratch. For the purposes of the demonstration, we will create a report with the following parameters:

Goal: I want to see a list of Challenge responses from the past week.
Visibility: Group (i.e. visible to any Hub administrator)
Required Data: Challenge Name, Question, Response, Member name, Member email
Filters: Date, Challenge ID
Visualization: Table

Building the Report

1: From the Reports tab of your AdvocateHub, click on the New Reports button located in the top right of the page.
2: You will be presented with a set of report types, ranging from Acts of Advocacy to Session Logs. Please read the descriptions and hover over each of them to see what types of data are contained therein. We are looking for Challenge Responses, and when we hover over the "Challenges" card, we can see it there.; Click on the "Challenges" card and then choose From Scratch.
3: This will bring you into the "Explore" section of Reporting, where you are presented with a large number of data fields on the left. Take some time to review our Data Dictionary, which describes all these options.; Reviewing our required data from the beginning of this article, we need to find Challenge Name, Question, Response, Member name, Member email.; After referring to the Data Dictionary, I know that the Challenge Name will be under the "Challenges" section while the question and response data are under "Challenge Responses." Information about AdvocateHub Members is within the "Challenge Responses > Contacts" section. We'll start by adding Challenge Name.; Now, we will repeat these steps for the remainder of the fields. Follow along with the video below.
4: If you run your report now, you may get a lot of blank questions and responses. This is because the report is not filtered and will pull in all Challenges, regardless of whether or not they have questions at all.; You can add Filters to your report by clicking on the filter icon (indicated in the green box below) beside the field you will use to narrow down your report.; Let's add a filter to ensure we only get Challenges that have questions. We'll do this by indicating that the "Questions" field should not be null.; Now, let's add the remaining two filters: Date and Challenge ID. This will allow us to choose a date range so that we can do regular reporting on specific periods. Adding an option Challenge ID filter will allow us to get responses to only specific Challenges. This is useful if you need to quickly export all responses to specific Challenge(s).; Since we want to filter by the date on which the response was given we'll navigate to "Challenge Responses" > "Created Date" > "Created Date" and click the filter icon to the right of the field name. This will give us a default range of seven days, but you can change it to whichever range you'd like.; Next, we'll add the Challenge ID filter by going to "Challenges" > "ID" and clicking the filter button to the right of the field name.; Watch the gif below to find the Challenge ID for any Challenge. You can find it at the end of the URL for any Challenge's Admin View page.
5: Now let's save this Report to our "Groups" section so that other administrators can find it.; Find the gear icon to the right of the Run button. Click on it and choose "Save as a Look."; Give the report a name and description that help you and others to understand its purpose. On the left side of the pop-up, choose the "Group" option, then click Save.