Best Way to import In-Kind Form Responses

Susan Fioribello

We get a lot of In-Kind donations and are looking to transfer from a paper form to a Microsoft Form. I have created the Form and have the results go into an Excel spreadsheet.

I am looking for recommendations on the best way to get the In-Kind gifts into Raiser's Edge.

Can this be done using Power Automate?

Austen Brown

@Susan Fioribello - This is possible, you don't even need to add the information into a excel doc first - you can have the flow run off of a new entry through the form and directly add the gift to RE. This will take some experimenting on your part - I'm not sure if there are any templates in the showcase that cover a use case like this. Looking purely at the available APIs and actions within the connectors…

If you want gifts to go into a batch first, you can use an HTTP call to “Create a gift batch” and the “add a gift to batch” action in the “Blackbaud Raisers Edge NXT Gifts” connector. This would be a great way to group gifts by day, if that is apart of your normal process.

Otherwise, you can add gifts directly to the system using an HTTP call to “Create a gift”.

@Alex Wong - Any additional thoughts?

Alex Wong

@Susan Fioribello
When using Microsoft Form, the submission is automatically entered into an excel file on sharepoint/onedrive depending on how you created the MS form. This excel file you can “ignore” unless you want to “batch”.

There are a few ways you can do this depending on your choice:

• automated per submission on MS form where gift is directly created
  • create gift directly using create gift endpoint
  • requires you to have a lot more info answered on the MS form (i.e. fund system id)
• not automated per submission on MS forms
  • using the excel file that MS form submission goes into, use a “manual” trigger when you want to do it (or a schedule trigger to do it at night).
    • one of the action you will do in the flow is to create a gift batch
    • then you will read through all submission in the excel file and batch them into the new gift batch created.
    • automation should “mark” the submission as completed with a status column added to the excel file (and potentially even the web batch # created into a batch column in the excel file)
  • this way you can review the batch and enter any missing information you like before approving the batch
  • another benefit is creating a gift in batch has less requirement for field being filled out as you can do that in the web batch.