Event gift import

Sunshine Reinken Watson

Our event vendor is going to attach the event participant import IDs to their post event report of all the gifts received. What is the best way to import gifts from that, if there is one? I know I need to circle back and attach the constituent import IDs. I'm just not sure if there is a process that would be more efficient than just entering a batch manually, minding that we also have to connect each gift to the event, etc. I have never done a big gift import. This will be 100+ gifts. Advice please!

Ryan Hyde

Hi Sunshine,


Gift imports are pretty straight forward, though you'll probably have to add a bunch of columns to your file to satisfy your business rules (appeal, campaign, fund, acknowledgement, etc.), but that stuff is pretty straight forward. Like you said, you'll need constituent IDs to make this work, but you SHOULD be able to do a query for anyone in the event and output their event import ID and their constituent ID, and use VLOOKUP in Excel to map that data into your spreadsheet. (If you don't know how to use the VLOOKUP function in Excel, google it. This is general advice to anyone reading this for any reason. Seriously, VLOOKUP is such a time saver in so many different scenarios). You can also add columns that would indicate the benefit category, count, and amount, if this applies to you. Do know that you will have to create a calculated field that takes the gift amount and subtracts the benefit amount. This will be your receipt amount, which you'll mape to the appropriate data field in the import. The import process will not automatically calculate a receipt amount for you (had to learn this one the hard way :P).


I don't think you can create the event link in the import process however, which is a bummer. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use an import though - it'll be way easier than doing every gift by hand in a batch.


When you do a gift import, you can command it to create a static gift query of all the imported gifts (see the Summary tab in the import setup - you probably already know that, but just being thorough). When you're done, open the query, output some data, and go through each one and create your link. This is still a fair amount of manual work, but it's a lot less than the batch method. 

Sunshine Reinken Watson

Ryan Hyde:

Hi Sunshine,


Gift imports are pretty straight forward, though you'll probably have to add a bunch of columns to your file to satisfy your business rules (appeal, campaign, fund, acknowledgement, etc.), but that stuff is pretty straight forward. Like you said, you'll need constituent IDs to make this work, but you SHOULD be able to do a query for anyone in the event and output their event import ID and their constituent ID, and use VLOOKUP in Excel to map that data into your spreadsheet. (If you don't know how to use the VLOOKUP function in Excel, google it. This is general advice to anyone reading this for any reason. Seriously, VLOOKUP is such a time saver in so many different scenarios). You can also add columns that would indicate the benefit category, count, and amount, if this applies to you. Do know that you will have to create a calculated field that takes the gift amount and subtracts the benefit amount. This will be your receipt amount, which you'll mape to the appropriate data field in the import. The import process will not automatically calculate a receipt amount for you (had to learn this one the hard way :P).


I don't think you can create the event link in the import process however, which is a bummer. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use an import though - it'll be way easier than doing every gift by hand in a batch.


When you do a gift import, you can command it to create a static gift query of all the imported gifts (see the Summary tab in the import setup - you probably already know that, but just being thorough). When you're done, open the query, output some data, and go through each one and create your link. This is still a fair amount of manual work, but it's a lot less than the batch method. 

Thank you for the thorough advice Ryan! I'm going to start setting up an import template in excel now!

Cathleen Mai

Just did it for our Event. I'm using Importacular (Zeidman, free for Gifts and Constituents). You can import into a regulat gift batch and then review before you committ.



Sunshine Watson:

Our event vendor is going to attach the event participant import IDs to their post event report of all the gifts received. What is the best way to import gifts from that, if there is one? I know I need to circle back and attach the constituent import IDs. I'm just not sure if there is a process that would be more efficient than just entering a batch manually, minding that we also have to connect each gift to the event, etc. I have never done a big gift import. This will be 100+ gifts. Advice please!

 

John Heizer

Sunshine Watson:

Our event vendor is going to attach the event participant import IDs to their post event report of all the gifts received. What is the best way to import gifts from that, if there is one? I know I need to circle back and attach the constituent import IDs. I'm just not sure if there is a process that would be more efficient than just entering a batch manually, minding that we also have to connect each gift to the event, etc. I have never done a big gift import. This will be 100+ gifts. Advice please!

It's a two step process.


First you Import the Gifts onto the Constituent records like any other Gift Import (Admin > Import > Gift > Gift).  This should include a manually created GiftImportID.  The next step is to link those Gift to the Participant records where they'll show up on the Participant's Donations tab (Admin > Import > Event > Other Donation).  That Import uses only the GiftImportID and the ParticipantImportID.  Note this assumes you already have those Participants in the Event module.