Add Actions In Bulk via API

Will Trapp

We run an email service where a Blackbaud customer can send one email to 10k people. We would love to make a record in Blackbaud Constituent Actions that the email was sent to the constituent, but how can we do this in bulk vs just calling the actions API 10k times. 


It would be great if we could pass in an array of constituent ids to the POST Actions API vs just one constituent id. 


Any workaround for adding actions or notes in bulk? 

Steven Cinquegrana

A bulk add of records of several types, including Constituents, Actions, Gifts, etc would be great. I'm pretty certain, though, that bulk data endpoints are not available (yet).


Bulk data creates some of its own challenges, not the least being duplicate handling, especially in the case of Constituents. It's also harder to provide accurate UI feedback to the user (if there is one) about progress, handle logging, outages, call quota etc.


At the moment, I think we're stuck with single record creation.

Steve Cinquegrana | CEO and Principal Developer | Protégé Solutions

 

Ben Lambert

Great question,


Steven is correct that we don't currently have any "bulk" endpoints (and correct about the challenges that would exist for that type of operation).  So today, the approach you'd take is to call the one-off CreateAction endpoint within the Constituent SKY API, and you'd likely batch that work on your end (which you'd want to do anyway in the interest of being robust in the face of API throttling.


That said, we're eager to get feedback to help shape our internal conversations.  For example, if the performance of making those one-off API calls is not good, perhaps there are optimizations we can do short of building bulk functionality.  So please keep us in the loop and provide any feedback you may have!

 

Will Trapp

Thanks Ben! Yes, if you could make the
constituent ids an array (where we can pass in multiple
constituents) vs just one that would be an amazing update. You
could even limit it to updating ~1000 constituents at once. If
that was the case, then it would take us 10 API calls to update
10,000 constituent vs 10,000 API calls. 

We think this makes the most sense for the actions and notes
post endpoint. We know this stuff takes time but wanted to provide
that feedback. 

Thanks!

Will Trapp Founder & CEO Gratavid

601-953-9823 will@gratavid.com gratavid.com