Import Software - is it worth it?

Jennifer Hoffman 4

Hello, I am new(ish) to my role within my organization, so still learning a lot. I know this topic has been discussed but I didn't see my specific question. We are currently evaluating if purchasing import software will be beneficial to our organization (Omatic). Mostly we have one time during the year when we have a major influx of external records and donations in which we need to import to RE (2500 records / not all new - some are just updating current records). We currently use gift import for the donations, but we are finding the constituent data input of these records takes the most time. The import tool in RE for constituent data has not been used previously and they were manually entering the data. I am trying to determine if purchasing external import software is worth the investment for our non-profit. Is there a specific number of records that you find made the investment worthwhile? In addition, how “smart” is the import process? This is my biggest concern. Much of the data collected during this time period is typically evaluated before being input into the database. We find that donors might give multiple times but do not include the same data on each donation form, so we determine which data to input and update. Since much of our current process of data import is having a human evaluate the records before updating, I am not sure if the software program would be “smart” with the data. Any insight from current users? We have only explored Omatic to date. Thank you!

Bobby Steurer

@Jennifer Hoffman
I highly recommend Importacular by Zeidman. It's free, and the Transformations feature has made so many of our importing tasks a breeze. I imagine that, in your scenario, once you've got it set up, it'll do everything you want and more. Link below.

Daniel R. Snyder

@Jennifer Hoffman I agree with @Bobby Steurer, but I think you are asking the right questions about how often you might use it. We really have one main import of new constituents a year and we ended up using the native RE7 import tool, but invested time into creating a data transformation process in Excel using Power Query so it is basically ready to import, but I can also flag the few items that still need manual attention.

Terri Nackid 3

@Jennifer Hoffman Omatic is expensive. We are just in the onboarding phase with Omatic and it's clearly going to be a complicated process getting to the point where we will use it. Importacular or just spending the time on regular import file set up would likely be a better option for 2,500 records.

Catherine Burns

@Jennifer Hoffman
I'm a huge fan of ImportOmatic, and would not be without it, but we are importing data from multiple sources every day. If you had it you may well find other uses for it. But for one big import a year I would stick with the native RE import. I have never used Importacular.

Ryan Hyde

@Bobby Steurer
I second the Importacular recommendation. If you need more advanced features, you can buy them a-la-cart, and I personally find the interface and logic flow in Zeidman's product to be much more intuitive.

Lee Grisham

@Jennifer Hoffman Importacular is the way to go! Best way to bring information into RE without dealing with all the particulars of Import. Check out my review to see how it has helped our org. They make it easy to see exactly what will be updated and what you don't want to include.

Patrick Clancy

@Jennifer Hoffman I use ImportOmatic weekly for importing a few hundred records from excel sheets, and then twice yearly for a few thousand constituents in CSVs and would recommend that approach rather than the built-in RE Import option; however, I also use Importacular for importing data from external sources like Eventbrite, and that is a perfect match for that particular task.

Lara Couture

@Jennifer Hoffman We have ImportOmatic and I love it! So much easier than using RE's import tool. once I learned how to set-up import profiles, it's super easy to create something on the fly. Worth every penny for us, given our university is using different data systems.

Lara Couture

@Terri Nackid, hang in there. It's overwhelming at first, but is really great once you get ImportOmatic set up.