39. REPORTS AND ANALYSIS T here are a number of techniques for reporting on and analysing your memberships. T he membership dashboard gives a quick overview of your current membership, with rows for each membership type and columns that current totals, and year and month to date figures.
T hat's a good start but there are a couple of ways that you can create more detailed and customised analysis using CiviCRM's search features and CiviReport. If you are interested in the financial aspects of membership, you may also find the reports and analysis chapter in contributions useful.
MEMBERSHIP REPORTS Out of the box, CiviCRM comes with three membership reports designed to tell you something specific about your membership. T he membership report (detail) shows a line for each member. T he membership report (summary) shows members grouped by any criteria you specify. For example, you can look at the amount of members that have joined each year for the last 10 years or show members broken down by country of origin or any other custom data that you collect on them. Clicking on any row in the summary report will take you to the a corresponding detail report for that row. T he membership report (lapsed) provides a list of memberships that lapsed or will lapse before the date you specify.
SEARCHING BASED ON MEMBERSHIP DATA CiviCRM makes an important distinction between contacts and memberships, which is blurred when we talking about 'members'. Consider the following question: 'How many members do we have? ' T his could be taken to mean 'how many contacts do we have that are members? ', or 'how many memberships have we granted to contacts? '. T he answer to these questions is often be the same but what happens if one of your contacts has more than one membership? T he answer is that you'll have two memberships but only one contact. T here's no right or wrong answer to the question should we look at contacts or memberships. It just depends on what you are interested in. It is important to take this into consideration when carrying out a search. T he Find members search allows you to search based on membership data and return membership data. T he Advanced search allows you to search based on some limited membership information (and combine that with other contact information) and return contacts. You can also choose membership from the Display Results As column to show members rather than contacts.
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