Need Import Advice

Katie Fox

Hi all,

Our organization currently enters all of our gift, and membership data manually in BATCH (DB View), and we’re in the process of transitioning to E-Membership — which is super exciting!

One of our biggest challenges right now is that RE NXT’s API doesn’t support membership upgrades or renewals, which make up the bulk of our daily membership activity. We're considering using Imports as an interim solution while we wait for the RXT functionality, but I’m having trouble finding clear answers and would love to learn from anyone who’s been through this.

Here are the big questions I’m wrestling with:

How many separate imports are typically required to replicate all the data we currently enter manually in Batch — especially when we use appeals, letter codes, solicitors, and reference fields? I originally thought this would be a 1-2 import solution, but I worry this could be a 3-4 import including constituency.

How do Member IDs work with imports? We don’t currently use them, but I understand they may be required for membership imports. What’s the best way to handle this as our data is inconsistent with them now? WHen reading the manual, it looks like I will need not only the constituency ID (which we primarily use) but a member ID and import ID?

If we’re importing gifts and memberships separately, how can we ensure that gifts are properly linked to the corresponding memberships? Is there a clean workflow for that?

I’ve already talked with our RE account reps, and they suggested working with a third-party consultant — which we may ultimately do — but I’d really appreciate any insight or advice from this group on what the daily work looks like. Thank you so much!

— Katie

Dariel Dixon

@Katie Fox If you're using entering all of these gift in DBV in batch, why not continue there until the functionality exists in NXT? Does the e-Membership require something in NXT? Importing this data would mean creating a link to the gift ID to the membership, which is where the Member ID comes in. It's just a key for memberships, most times it is completely internal.

All of this feels a lot more complicated than just continuing to use DB batch where this functionality already exists.

Katie Fox

@Dariel Dixon Thanks Dariel! You are correct, this is getting more complicated than I had hoped, but for many reasons we would like to transition to E-memberships, which would be synced to RE without entering all the data. Right now, we manually enter line by line in batch from the work from the day/s prior, and we are pushing to decrease our manual entry and get more timely in pushing out our membership "cards" so people can have them instantly rather than waiting for our team to enter, print, mail, etc. While we cannot eliminate this without being able to use our API with NXT, I am looking to see if using Import with gifts and membership was a simple and less time-consuming process. Thanks!

Dariel Dixon

@Katie Fox Yikes! That sounds terribly taxing, tedious and time-consuming! I would look into a third party import tool that may help with these issues. In particular, it would be helpful to just import these gifts into a batch, which some tools can do. That way, you don't have to worry about creating and managing the member IDs. Regardless, you'll still have to do some constituent matching throughout the process, but the gift can be linked a membership in the batch.

Stu Manewith

@Katie Fox Omatic Software (ImportOmatic) handles importing membership data into RE NXT (database view) very neatly, typically with just a single import. Please contact integrate@omaticsoftware.com for more information, or contact me personally at stu.manewith@omaticsoftware.com.

Christine Robertson

@Katie Fox I would definitely use either Omatic or @David Zeidman's Importacular for a Membership import (I don't know the functionality for the other import tools, but they would be worth a look as well). Having imported Memberships with the native RE7 import tool, I think it is 100% worth the investment to add one of the third-party tools that will alleviate many of the cumbersome aspects of Membership importing.

David Zeidman

@Katie Fox Importacular is able to import your membership data with relative ease in a single pass. There are a lot of functions that assist you in automatically determining many areas that can be cumbersome with the native import. For example there is functionality to determine whether a membership renewal should be an upgrade, downgrade, etc.

Feel free to reach out to me or one of my team at zeidman.info

David