Importing Organization Relationships for Existing Organizations

Becky Perkins
Becky Perkins
Fifth Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1 Blackbaud Certified
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

I am trying to figure out how to import organization relationships when the organizations are already constituents. I have the constituent ID for organizations and for the individuals I want to link to them. I have been looking at knowledgebase articles but am confused because there doesn't seem to be a place for the Orgs' constituent IDs. Instead the articles are talking about Organization Relationship Import IDs and Relationship Links, which seem to be about updating existing relationships. I'm not trying to make any updates other than linking existing individuals to existing organizations as new relationships. Is there a way to do this through import?

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  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 4 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    @Becky Perkins
    Yes you can do an import, but you will need the org's constituent import id instead of the constituent id to do the linking

  • Christine Robertson
    Christine Robertson
    Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant First Anniversary

    @Becky Perkins As @Alex Wong mentioned, you do need the Constituent Import ID of the Organization for this rather than the Constituent ID. I would also use the Constituent Import ID for the record that is being related to the Org. I've found that sometimes using a combination of Import ID and Constituent ID just doesn't play nicely in RE Import.

    If you're new to importing, I recommend creating your own Import IDs for the Relationship (which is a completely separate Import ID from the other two we've discussed). I like to use one that includes a prefix of “CR-022024-” with a number afterwards that makes each one unique (CR-022024-1, CR-022024-2, etc.). Adding this to your file can help avoid exception messages and it also makes it easier if you need to make a correction later.

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 4 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    @Christine Robertson
    I have always used Constituent ID for the individual, and then Constituent Import ID for the Org record to relate to and have no issue importing. It is important to make sure the correct option is selected though.

    As for your comment about creating your own Import ID for the relationship, I think there's goods and bads of doing so, I like to keep import id the way RE auto creates them, which is always, 00001-xxx-0000000000 where xxx is the unique to the “type of record” (gift, constituent, participant, etc) and 0000000000 is actually the system record id of that record (i.e. 0000000001, 0000000002, etc).

    @Becky Perkins

    fe7c3e646f89facbc31c53fd574a7d27-huge-im
    38756f9bb21cdacd1767cf86d54ee706-huge-im
    e40d4e3025cf49936d81ce01837c7e92-huge-im

    NOTE that the Org Constituet Import ID is map to Relationship Link

  • Christine Robertson
    Christine Robertson
    Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant First Anniversary

    @Alex Wong These are absolutely valid preferences and each user should decide what works for them.

  • Becky Perkins
    Becky Perkins
    Fifth Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1 Blackbaud Certified

    @Alex Wong Thank you so much. This is the information I needed.

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