Best Of
Re: Custom Smart Field - string data type max field size
@Dyan Karstens
I am not sure there is a great around that limitation. Smart fields do not support a long text data type like Memo. You might be able to do something fancy where the smart field value is a foreign key to a custom table you create that supports longer text, but that might be a little convoluted to create and support.
I think one way you might be able to get around that would be to use an attribute with a Memo datatype. You could write a global change and/or function that pulls in the desired string lists, and writes them to the attribute table.
Re: Repeating Letter Issues
Rats! That is exactly what I found. Everything referred to a Plumsail or Encodian or AI Builder which require extra cost. It may be going back to the drawing board and assessing our situation with letter codes.
I really appreciate the confirmation. I kinda felt like I was spinning my wheels in the mud and maybe not fully comprehending the flow structures or missing pieces in the process. There have been many redos and fresh starts?.
Thanks,
Cheena
Sharing my Import Templates
I had the pleasure of tuning into the Blackbaud Champions data cleanup roundtable yesterday and the subject of imports for cleanup and creating templates from the import guidebook came up. A few people mentioned wanting template examples, and I've built up a few over the years, which I'm sharing here. For all of these, if you are updating existing records, you will need the import ID of the constituent and sometimes the phone number or other piece of information.
Please feel free to ask any questions!
- Address import template - useful for cleanup or importing data from a third party verification service
- Actions import template
- Constituent import template - I used this one for brand new event attendees who were in an external system.
- Hard bounce Email Import - this is a template I use to mass mark emails as hard bounced from an external software (in this case mailchimp). You will have to query the email addresses and export the constituent import ID and the phone ID's for each email address you want to modify.
- Notes import template - Mass adding notes. We use this to track our top 25 vendors for each fiscal year.
- Phone Import - I use this for data cleanup by exporting phones, identifying duplicates, then using the constituent and phone ID's to change the phone types of the dupes to DELETE, which I can globally delete via a plugin. Especially useful after a phonefinder run.
Constituent Import Template - Individuals.csv
Hard Bounce Email Import Template.csv
