Constituent Org. Record serving as Event Record - Help me clean this up!

Joy park · September 2016

Oh my.... so it's my very first Community topic! I need HELP!

I was doing massive amounts of cleanup when I encountered this monstrosity in our RE and I am just reaching out to pick others' brains before I set off on this insane task.

We had an event, but the person responsible for all data entry decided that the Event should be an Organization constituent record. This record seems to serve as holding all donations and registration ticket purchase info to the event, the premiums sold at the event, and anything Anonymous that was related.

This must have been before we had the Events module! But I am not sure how to start, given that nearly all the gifts are soft-credited and nothing is linked to the Event Record (created obviously, very post-mortem). I really would not like to vaporize everything and start from scratch with an Import, but if that is the only way, I would welcome some feedback on where to start and what NOT to do!

Thanks in advance!

Faith Murray · September 2016

First off - WOW. What a creative and terrible way of recording an event record. I admire your soon-to-be-tested patience in cleaning this up.

I think the only real way of doing this IS through Import. You say the gifts are all soft-credited ... so, are they housed on the real donor's record and soft-credited to the Event, or are they housed on the Event and soft-credited to the real donor? If they are housed on the Event, you will need to export the gifts and re-import them back onto the real donor's records. If they are housed on the donors records, I would suggest just breaking the soft-credit links.

Depending what type of data is stored on the Event record, and how many years the Event record covered (was it just the 2015 Event, or was it an annual event that ran for 20 years, all smushed onto one record?) you will need to pull queries off the data sorted by date, registration type, etc. After you have all the data grouped into Queries, you may be able to use a Global Add to add your Event participation information to a group of donor records - which is much easier than an import.

Once you have your Gifts assigned to the proper records, and your event participation information Global Added into the correct donor records, then you can simply delete the Monstrosity. And then, you can write a BlackBaud horror mini-novel and make millions.

Amy Dana · September 2016

I agree with Faith - the best way to tackle this is queries and imports/global adds.

I also agree that this would make a horrifying novel; I had a mild panic attack even trying to THINK about how to solve this! Best of luck to you and yours, and may the odds be ever in your favor.

Constituent Org. Record serving as Event Record - Help me clean this up!

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