If it is a field for an Action Item, please make it available to auto-fill when importing!

Michelle Livanos

Please let me start by saying that I know this is not the correct place to make this kind of suggestion - however, I cannot find the Blackbaud Community to make it, and I have already spent so much time (hours) trying to accomplish what I am about to suggest, that I simply do not have the time to try to continue my search for the correct place.


If a field exists in an Action Item, can you please make it available as a field to map when importing data? I imported a bunch of Action Items, included the Assigned Solicitor for the Action Item in my excel spreadsheet, only to not be able to map this entry when importing. I thought - no big deal - I can do a Global Change. One would think that would be a logical next move. Nope! It is certainly not, in the World of Blackbaud. Much to my chagrin, one cannot do a Global Change to add the Assigned Solicitor, because - again- it is not offered as an option. A chat with Blackbaud revealed that action items can be added to an Assigned Solicitor's portfolio, with a Global Add. This is all nice and dandy - however, not everybody in the portfolio received the action, and some were not even in the portfolio. In short, I had to add folks to a portfolio, add the action item, and then go back, one-by-one, to delete the action item from each one who did not receive the action. That took way longer than it should have. I should have been done, and eating my lunch now. But no, not only has my time been taken up, now I have to make the suggestion for it to be fixed. Please fix. Thank you! My time is way more valuable.

Austen Brown

I completely understand your frustrations, this adds time to an already complicated process.  There are a requests listed in the Raiser's Edge community idea bank on this topic.  You could create a new idea (just copy and paste your comments here) or go vote for another listing.  The hyperlinked area is where BB Staff will got to ideas for change for specific product. 

Michelle Livanos

Thank you for directing me to the correct place - appreciate it. Thank you, also, for understanding my frustration. To import data is really not a complicated procedure, but when not all fields are available to import, then the complications begin.

Keri Barnhart

This is certainly one of the more annoying things about importing actions!


As a work around until it's changed, we temporarily make Assigned Solicitor not required while we do the import (no solicitor column in the file!) and we manually create the import ID. Then we go back and do a second import to attach the solicitor. We can use the same file for both steps, since we created an ImportID for the action, and it's there in the column. I just make sure that when I'm setting up the import, I tell RE to ignore certain columns, so that it doesn't spit out errors at me.