Report template: Contact-Level Retention

What you’ll learn in this article:

• An overview of the Contact-Level Retention report template
• How to personalize retention information
• An introduction to loyalty metrics to support retention analysis
• How to analyze and discover participants who are new to your event or organization, especially those who are supporting your brand in 2020
• Why it matters that this report is at a Contact-Level

What is the purpose of this report template?
Learn how the ‘Contact-Level Retention’ report template can be used and customized to analyze participants who are new or have not yet been retained. Become confident in pulling retention information that matters to your organization and/or event.

How to use the Contact-Level Retention report template:
Open the “Contact-Level Retention” report in your CRM portal, available in the "CRM Report Templates" folder. For step-by-step instructions on how to open this report template resource this quick tutorial. 

Tip: Ensure you always ‘save as’ when using a report template - this way you’ll have the template to refer back to or use again. 

By default, this report will identify participants with active registrations for the previous year (ex. 2019) who don’t have a registration for the current year (ex. 2020). Default template settings also ensure that you’re only looking at active registrations and no testing or demo data. The basis of the report template can be seen below:

This report pulls data at a Contact-Level. This means that participant data is being analyzed at an individual view and not in terms of specific or unique registrations. We look at why this matters below.

First, ensure you’re only pulling meaningful, relevant data. Two additional filters have been added by default to this report template to accomplish this. 

• The field filter “Testing” equals False to ensure participants are all legitimate and no demo or testing data is pulled. This filter is automatically added as part of the report template.
• The sub-filter “Is Active” equals True will only pull participants whose registrations are active. This is a way to exclude cases of refunds, transfers or deferrals; cases where registrations were made inactive. This filter is automatically added as part of the report template.

It’s important that you’re comfortable with reporting before diving in. Our CRM reporting guides are a great resource to work with when customizing your own reports. Start with the basic reporting guide and level up to the intermediate reporting guide where we cover important terminology that you’ll see below.

What are some ways to customize this template?

The default ‘Contact-Level Retention’ report template is the bare minimum of what is required to pull retention information. However, to take your analysis a step further, let’s walk through additional ways to analyze your retention data.

Analyze by Event:

• Add a sub-filter for Event to pull data for a specific event. Add the filter Event contains “event 1” such as “forest city” to both cross-filters in the report. Use contains as the expression to ensure all applicable records are pulled.

This data view will show all contacts who had an active registration for the Forest City event in 2019 who don’t yet have a registration in 2020 for the Forest City event.

Analyze for specific Years of Data:

• Rather than looking at those who were retained from only the previous year to the current year, get specific and analyze multiple years of data. Expand the Event Year sub-filter under the “Contacts with Registrations” cross-filter to include different years such as “2017, 2018, 2019”.

This data view will show all contacts who had a registration in 2017, 2018 and/or 2019 who don’t yet have a registration in 2020.

Analyze participants who took years off:

• Identify those who skipped a specific year, but came back to race with your organization. These participants are still loyal to your brand but missed a year. Add a cross-filter for “Contacts with Registrations” with sub-filters for Event Year equals “2021” and Is Active equals “True”.

This data view will show all contacts who had active registrations in 2019 and 2021 who didn’t have a registration in 2020. 

Analyze multiple Event combinations: 

• Under “Contacts with Registrations” list each Event you want to analyze within your sub-filter (up to 2). Then add a cross-filter for “Contacts without Registrations” with a sub-filter for Event contains and Event Year equals. Remember, a report can have a maximum of 3 cross-filters. Use contains as the expression to ensure all event data is pulled.

This data view will show all contacts who had a registration for the Forest City or Kids Race events in 2019 who don’t yet have a registration in 2020 for either the Forest City or Kids Races events.

The above could also be read as the following:
(Contacts with Registrations where [(Event Year=2019)AND(Is Active=True)AND(Event contains “forest city” OR “kids races”)]) AND (Contacts without Registrations where [(Event Year=2020)AND(Event contains “forest city”)]) AND (Contacts without Registrations where [(Event Year=2020)AND(Event contains “kids races”)])

An Introduction to loyalty metrics

Before we dive into loyalty segmentation, it is important to outline that loyalty metrics are all-time for the organization; loyalty metrics do NOT exist at the event level. This is still the case even if the report is pulling data for a specific year or specific event. Let’s review several loyalty fields and what they mean: 

• Number of Races - A count of unique events that a contact has participated in. 

For example, Contact A ran the 10K and Half Marathon during the Marathon Weekend event in 2019. These 2 registrations are both under one event (EID) and count as only 1 Race.

• Number of Registrations - A count of every registration a contact has. The “Number of Registrations” field will always be equal to or greater than the “Number of Races” field.

For example, Contact A ran the 10K and Half Marathon during the Marathon Weekend event in 2019. These 2 registrations will add a count of 2 towards Contact A’s Number of Registrations total. 

• # of Years Participated - An integer for how many years a contact has participated in events for the organization.

For example, Contact A has participated in the 5K for the past 3 years and in the third year also ran the 10K. The # of Years Participated will total to 3 for Contact A.

• Years Participated - A string of all of the years that the contact has participated in events for the organization. When using this field always use the expression ‘contains’.
  

For example, Contact A has participated in the 5K for the past 3 years and in the third year also ran the 10K. The Years Participated include “2017, 2018, 2019”.

Analyze participants based on loyalty metrics:

• Segment even further to identify your loyal customers from those who have not been retained. Depending on the loyalty metric you want to analyze, use a field filter to segment the unretained loyal customers by the following:
  • Number of Races
  • Number of Registrations
  • # of Years Participated
  • Years Participated

This data view will show all contacts who had 4 or greater active registrations over all-time who participated in 2019 who have not yet been retained in 2020 - with a registration in 2020.

Some questions to ask as you’re analyzing data with a Contact-Level Retention report:

• Who has not been retained this year that participated last year? 
• Who has not been retained this year that participated in the last 5 years?
• Who has not been retained for this specific event?
• Who has not been retained for this specific event in the last 3 years? 
• Who has not been retained this year for this group of events? 
• Who has not been retained this year for all events my organization produces?
• Who was not retained for a specific year but came back?
• How do I define a loyal participant?
• What segments of loyal participants are at risk of not being retained this year? 
• Which gender is more likely to be retained?
• Who has not been retained from a specific geographical location?
• Which geographical locations have higher groups of unretained participants?  

For questions in relation to registration-specific questions such as sub event metrics, reference the Registration-Level retention report article.

Reverse the Contact-Level Retention template to discover new participants

The Contact-Level Retention report template can be used to analyze participants who are new to your organization and or event. Depending on your marketing goals, it may be beneficial to know who and how many participants are new to your organization and or event. Especially in uncertain times, you may find it beneficial to discover participants who are new to your organization or a specific event, especially those who are supporting your brand in 2020. All of the examples that we outlined above can be used to discover new participants by using an alternate (the reverse) view of the Contact-Level Retention report template. Let’s review how-to below:

Analyze new participants to your organization

• To analyze new participants, update the “Contacts with Registrations” sub-filter for Event Year to equal “2020” or the current year you’re analyzing. Then update the “Contacts without Registrations” sub-filter for Event Year not equal to “2020”

This data view will show all contacts who are new to your organization as of the current year, 2020, as they have a 2020 registration and no registrations in any past year, that is not 2020.

Analyze new participants to your event

• Add a sub-filter for Event under both cross-filters to pull data for a specific event. Add the sub-filter Event contains “Event 1” such as “forest city”. Use contains as the expression to ensure all data is pulled.

This data view will show all contacts who are new to the specified event, Forest City, for the year 2020.

Analyze new participants with loyalty metrics

• Get specific and ensure that the participants are new to your organization for a specific year by using loyalty metrics for the opposite use case:
• Use the “Number of Registrations” field to ensure only 1 registration all-time
• Use the "Number of Races" field to ensure only 1 race all-time
• Use the “# of Years Participated” field to ensure the contact has only participated for a specific year all-time for the organization’s history

This data view will show all contacts who are new to the organization for the year 2020, with the count for their Total Number of Registrations equaling 1. This means that the individuals on this report haven’t registered for any other events the organization has hosted over all-time.

Some questions to ask as you’re analyzing data from this perspective of the report template:

• Who is completely new to my organization?
• Who is completely new to this specific event?

For questions in relation to registration-specific questions such as sub event metrics, reference the Registration-Level retention article.

What is the difference between a Contact-Level and Registration-Level report?
We’ve outlined how to utilize the Retention report template at a Contact-Level, however it is important to touch on what that means as well as outlining how this is different from a Registration-Level.

When viewing a Contact-Level Retention report each line or record in the report is a unique contact. This is because the cross-filters (ex. Contacts with Registrations for Event Year equals 2019) apply on the main record that you are seeing in the report itself. The result is that each line or record in the report is 1 unique contact.

When viewing a Registration-Level retention report, each line or record in the report is a registration. In the case of this type of report, the cross-filters apply on the object above the main record that you are seeing in the report (the cross-filter applies to the Contact object, but in the report, you are seeing the child records of those Contacts; i.e, the registrations). Because of this, Registration-Level retention reports need to be filtered on 2 levels: the Registration-Level via normal field filters as well as on the Contact-Level via cross-filters.


Learn more about a Registration-Level retention report here.

If you have any questions or would like Race Roster to review your Contact-Level Retention report don’t hesitate to contact your Customer Success Manager.