Entering 'Survey Monkey' Survey Responses into RE

Alper Gungor
Alper Gungor
Sixth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions
We've been conducting surveys including questions with multiple choice options and with open-ended responses. I store the open-ended responses as an action but creating the import file using the data file exported from Survey Monkey is taking so long because all answers have to be in the same column in the import file in order to put them into a single action/notepad. I am wondering how you deal with this, do you have any better practices which also takes less time?

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  • Faith Murray
    Faith Murray
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper
    Alper, I'm not sure if this is helpful or not ... we also store survey data in RE under an Action, but we use action attributes. This allows us to store the variable responses as a text value and the menu responses as a table value.


    Importing as action attributes also requires each field (each attribute) to be its own cell in the same column. You probably do this already: when moving items from a single row to separate lines in a single column, it helps how you sort your spreadsheet beforehand, so that you can just copy one big block of info at a time and paste it to the bottom rows of your spreadsheet.


    So if your starting file looks like this:



    ...you leave Q1 column alone, but sort by Q2, copy the block,




    paste to the bottom (blank) portion of the file, then cut column Q2 values in that block...



    and paste over column Q1 values in that block. You can then delete the "old" (moved) columns Q2 and Response 2.



    Repeat process for Q3/Response3 columns and all subsequent columns.


    This process seems involved because of multiple steps, but once you get used to it, it takes literally a few minutes even with a large file of several hundred names. We do this frequently for manually importing Mailchimp data, where RE places multiple email addresses in one row, while Mailchimp requires one email per row as it uses the email address as the unique identifier.


    If someone else has a smarter way of doing this, please share! I'm always open to more efficient methods, and maybe there's a formula in excel that I am overlooking.



  • Alper Gungor
    Alper Gungor
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1
    Thanks Faith! Yes I do that already. It's not a problem for me to put each field in its own cell. But some questions are longer than 50 characters (the limit for attribute category) and responses are longer than 255 characters. Because of this, I had to import those as action notes instead of attributes in some cases which needs to be put all questions and responses in a single cell. I use some excel formulas to do that but I feel like it is not efficient as it takes long time.

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