DonorSearch AI

Patrick Motter

Hello RE Community,

We have RE NXT and just signed up for DonorSearch AI. I want to see if there is anyone that has used theses products together and would have any ideas on the best way to integrate the data from DS to RE NXT.

Faith Murray

@Patrick Motter
I have twice been involved in inputting DonorSearch data into Raiser's Edge. The first time, I was a rookie in my second year in database work, and we let DS import the data for us because they promised they could do it. The basically dumped all the info - real estate, business ties, etc. - into our constituent Notes. We also didn't get all the info we wanted, such as their gift capacity and giving interests.

The second time, I imported the data myself from a raw file. I selected the columns we found most useful and imported it directly into the Prospect tab, where it belongs, creating custom Ratings and table entries to hold the data. Some info like Foundation affiliations and stocks went into a special “Foundation entity” attribute and constituent code. It was a long process that I wouldn't want to do every month, but it was totally worth it for our capital campaign strategies.

To sum up, I'm not aware of a plugin that integrates the two systems. I've heard that Omatic might be able to let you map various types of excel data in automated imports, so you might look there. DS seems out of touch with the best place to import the data (on their own website HERE they propose dumping everything into Attributes). So take the reigns and don't let them do it for you!

Mark Guncheon

@Patrick Motter As Faith stated, years ago when we started using a wealth ratings service, I imported the ratings into the ratings under the prospect tab in the dataview. It was millions of records because we were using 8 of DS' ratings at the time. so each record had 8 ratings to be added. First problem was how long this took because it tied up my computer. Then I figured out I could open multiple RE accounts so I could do my other work while each import was happening. However, the security on our computer would log me out if I wasn't an active user. I eventually found a way around that to enable me to do some of these imports overnight. I update these ratings twice a year and have a query/export set up to pull out all those I want rated. The export sets up the created file with a format that works for DS. Then when I download the screened files from DS, I use a template in excel to create each of the 8 import files. It adds the Date, Category, Description and Notes data to each record (ConsID and Rating). Before I start importing, I globally delete the old DS ratings. Then I start the importing.