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Importing Gifts from external site

Della DeGroff

Our organization has an external site to take some donations, once a week they send us a report with a list of the donations and what gets depostied into our account. Is there a way to bulk import these gifts? Import wasn't quite getting the results I was needing, unless I was doing it wrong. And my team would like to be able to imput the csv file that we are sent from the other site to update our database with those gifts

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Tatyana Leifman

Can you elaborate on what where the issues with native import? I think that would help us to troubleshoot on whether the import your organization built needs adjustment or you would need to look for external 3-rd party tools like ImportOmatic/Omatic or Importacular.

Della DeGroff

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/313353#Comment_313353

So my csv file I get from the 3rd party donation form has constituent name, gift amount, email, gift date, fund ID, etc. I need that to be imported into the system and linked with the correct constituent. When I run a constituent import, I do not see the options I need regarding gift information (amount, date, fund). When I run a gift import, I do not see the options for constituent that I need (name, email, etc). I am very much still learning this side of RE and RENXT, so any help is appreciated.

Alex Wong

If you want a single process for handling constituent search, constituent matching, potentially create new constituent, then add the gift into the constituent via gift batch, you are going to need a "tool":

Import-O-Matic
Omatic Cloud
Importacular
SMARTSync

these are some of the tool available, there are more, and there are also option to create your own via SKY API.

Tatyana Leifman

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/313360#Comment_313360

So it looks like you would need to use a 3-rd party tool like IOM/Omatic or Importacular. Omatic is paid. Importacular, I believe, has a free version. Both have the ability to match constituents by name and email and/or address (however you specify the matching criteria) without RE ID and create new records if a match is not found and import gifts, all in one import.

Otherwise you would need to look up the RE IDs or import ids (I find looking up RE IDs is easier) of all the donors in the file and create new records where needed. Then take the RE IDs or Import IDs of these records and add them to the gift file to use a gift import.

There are Excel VLookup tools that can be built to quickly look up and match RE IDs to the donors (RE easy import has one).

Dan Snyder

+1 for Importacular. We use it for this exact purpose and we have a paid subscription ($1K) so we can import the gifts into batch. But it handles:

1. The matching of constituents with our set matching criteria

2. The ability to review any non-automatic matches

3. It can create new constituents if needed

4. Imports all of this gifts into a batch (that is our process), but you could certainly import them directly to the record if you prefer.

Robin Kuehn

Our Org uses Omatic Cloud for this purpose, and we're quite happy with how well it matches constituents and can even look through non-constituent records for matches. I use it to import all sorts of data from spreadsheets - we too use an external donation form system, plus gifts through all of the 3rd-party pass-through fundraisers (Benevity, PayPal Giving Fund, etc), volunteer hours, purchase data from Shopify, event participation, consent changes, record updates from our email client, and so on.

Between the advanced matching, simultaneous gift and constituent imports, data review steps, flexibility to use it for all kinds of data, and the data cleanup it can do along the way, I've almost completely dropped using RE's import system.

Candy Reichert

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/313373#Comment_313373

We use this also. the $1K price option will ent on 03/2027. Then it will be $2K for the NXT version. This is what I have been told. Just plann ahead.

Dan Snyder

Thanks @Candy Reichert!

Faith Murray

I'm going to add two comments to this: first, that you don't necessarily need to "look up" the constituent IDs to match a constituent import with a second, gift import. When importing the constituents, use the option to create a query of the imported records. Then use that query to export the newly made constituent list, with IDs, and use excel matching formulas to auto-match the records on the name or address column. If you learn how to do excel column matching, it's a simple 10-minute process that can save you thousands of dollars in third-party software fees.

Second, before beginning a subscription, look to see what Blackbaud plans to release in the next 12 months. I believe they stated the intention of building webview imports to be able to process constituents and gifts in a single run. Whether that pans out remains to be seen, but it would be unfortunate to commit to the costs and learning curve of third party software that becomes unnecessary a few months later.