Constituent Import

Kathleen Onello

Hey Everybody, 

I have two questions about constituent imports. If you wanted to upload the gender for the people you are uploading how would that work. I watched a video and made row A the headers. Would it be Gender in the first row and for each constituent would you put male or female or just an M or F? 


Also, How do you add multiple constituent codes to one constituent in an import? In cell L1 I have ConsCode. I want to use 2 constituent codes for each person I am uploading. One is individual and the other is former volunteer. 


Thanks for all your help!

Katie 

Alan French

Yes you'd want the heading 'Gender' in the first row, and also a heading for the column with the constituent IDs. I think the values accepted by default are 'male', 'female' and 'unknown' although it depends if your organisation has customised its Gender code table.


The way I would import multiple constituent codes in the same file is by having each constituent ID in the file twice, one for each code. So you have your list of IDs with the code 'individual' next to them, then copy all those IDs and paste them at the bottom of the ID column and put the code 'volunteer' next to them. I guess my only question would be whether you really need a constituent code of 'individual' when that's also their Key Indicator, but that's a separate issue!

Dariel Dixon

If you are importing constituent codes, make sure your import file is set so that you are importing what you want to be the primary code as code 1.  You can't import constituent codes without making sure the import file has a column for code 1 and code 2.

JoAnn Strommen

How are you importing your data? RE Import? OMatic? Importacular? 


If you're using RE import function, as Dariel Dixon‍ said, I would have two columns, code 1 and code 2.  If your importing date from/date 2 just double check in your import file that the extensions match up that set 1 is 1 and set 2 has extension 2. 


To think about, what is your purpose for your constituent code field? For most it's "why is this record in database/what is relation to us?"  From that perspective as Alan French‍ commented, they are already identified as Individuals with the key indicator. I know their are orgs that use individual but I wonder how many at times wish it was more specific such as alum, board member, staff, volunteer, etc.