DataSync with Donor Perfect Import Module

Maureen Joyce

Does anyone have experience using the Donor Perfect Import Module to upload online gifts from Convio? Our data sync is currently set up to produce three separate files to import into DP: new records, updated records and gifts. Uploading three separate files seems cumbersome and time consuming and I wondered if anyone found a better way to sync information between the two systems.

Mary Cosgrove

Hi,

We have donor perfect also, but no data sync with convio. We have been entering our convio donation txns manually into Donor Perfect.

We have not been entering new registered users into DP, however. I have just not made it a priority. So the only folks who make it into DP are manually entered to DP. I too would love to get some guidance as to how to do regular imports into DP and vice versa without creating duplicates. Let me know if you have any other insight.

Thanks,

Mary

Bennett Donovan

Mary Cosgrove:

Hi,

We have donor perfect also, but no data sync with convio. We have been entering our convio donation txns manually into Donor Perfect.

We have not been entering new registered users into DP, however. I have just not made it a priority. So the only folks who make it into DP are manually entered to DP. I too would love to get some guidance as to how to do regular imports into DP and vice versa without creating duplicates. Let me know if you have any other insight.

Thanks,

Mary

The best technique to avoid importing duplicates into Donor Perfect would of course be to have the Donor Perfect unique ID on the Convio record so that you could easily identify a match when importing into DP. There is functionality, called Shadow File matching, in Convio that will allow you to assign an existing DP ID to a Convio record. The Shadow File is a reference file that holds some basic data about all your DP constituents who do NOT have email addresses and therefore were NOT uploaded into Convio as full-blown online constituents. Once the Shadow File is uploaded into Convio, then every new online constituent created via a Website interaction can be compared against every Shadow File record (as well as against every existing Convio record). Any matches will show up in the online Resolve New Registrations duplicate management utility. When the match is to a record in the Shadow File, it is easy to move the DP ID (pulled from the Shadow File) right onto the Convio record.

There is no requirement for a custom DataSync in order to make use of Shadow File matching. Please contact your Account Manager if you are interested in pursuing this further.

Maureen Joyce

Mary Cosgrove:

Hi,

We have donor perfect also, but no data sync with convio. We have been entering our convio donation txns manually into Donor Perfect.

We have not been entering new registered users into DP, however. I have just not made it a priority. So the only folks who make it into DP are manually entered to DP. I too would love to get some guidance as to how to do regular imports into DP and vice versa without creating duplicates. Let me know if you have any other insight.

Thanks,

Mary

Thank you Mary. Our data sync is set up with the shadow file matching Bennett described. (I think he helped set ours up). After matching up potential duplicates in the 'resolve new registrations' area I import a file I pull from donor perfect that consists of all donor files WITH emails. Convio compares that file to our current Convio records and updates records as appropriate and produces three files:

new profiles - records created in Convio that do not match existed Convio records or DP records in the shadow file; updated profiles - Convio records that have a corresponding Convio ID that have been updated online (address update, new email, etc.); and a gift file - with donation information.

As for Donor Perfect not creating duplicates (they do occasionally slip by) there are options in the DP import module that allow you to set up match criteria. You can use a 'linking field' - like the DP or Convio ID #, or you can set up a custom match - like same last name, first 10 characters of the address and first 5 digits of the zip code. But even with all of these measure we do a good bit of cleaning and deduping manually.

More specifically my concerns with DP are that I think our data sync was designed with the old import module, so I may need to have Convio re-evaluate our set up to work more efficiently with Donor Perfect's new import module. I was wondering if there were any Convio/Donor Perfect users that may be using the new import module that could share their good and bad experiences. For example, the new import module forces a file re-index after each import. Since we have three separate files to import, that is three re-indexing processes and each can take up to 10 minutes (I'm told this may be a server problem on our end, however our IT team is not thrilled with the idea of moving DP to another server). I'm wondering if we could get all the Convio info into DP with one or two files.

Any other advice is welcome. Thanks again!!