Importing Information Into Raiser's Edge

Kristin Meli · July 2017

Hello, my company would like to import email addresses and other information that we obtained from a festival into Raiser's Edge. Some of the contacts are current constituents and some are not. Is there a way to import the information without creating duplicate records?

Joanne Felci 2 · July 2017

HI Kristin,

A few questions:

1. How many people are we talking about - on the list you received from the festival and the size of your database

2. Besides email what other information do you have on that file (Name, mailing address, etc)

3. How is the information - is it in an excel file, on slips of paper, etc.

Depending on what information besides email you have, you might not be able to know if you'll get duplicates

If you know which ones are current constitutents if you export their con id, you can import the data into their records

As for the rest, it depends on what information you have as to whether RE will flag it as a potential duplicate. If you have Import-o-Matic that would have further granularity to find dupes.

Joanne

Kristin Meli · July 2017

Joanne,

Thank you for answering my question so promptly. We would be
importing an excel spreadsheet containing: first name, last name,
and minimum email address (sometimes it has full
address/phone/email). But for this specific instance, we just have
the email address.

Thank you,

Kristin

Joni Mraz · July 2017

Kristin Meli:

Hello, my company would like to import email addresses and other information that we obtained from a festival into Raiser's Edge. Some of the contacts are current constituents and some are not. Is there a way to import the information without creating duplicate records?

Same question here .... I've inherited Excel spreadsheets for various mailing lists, which as you can imagine is cumbersome. I would really like to import them into our Raiser's Edge database, but have the same concerns regarding duplication of records, since our spreadsheets also have a mixture of current constituents and non-constituents. Yikes!

Cathleen Mai · July 2017

Kristin Meli:

Hello, my company would like to import email addresses and other information that we obtained from a festival into Raiser's Edge. Some of the contacts are current constituents and some are not. Is there a way to import the information without creating duplicate records?

Depending on the size of your list, you could run a query with the criteria Email address is "one of" (make sure to include all email types) and copy your emails from the excel sheet in blocks of up to 500 records into the query. You can do this multiple times if you have more than 500 records. At least that would give you Constituents that already have that email address in RE. See instructions here - https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/41666

Jill Freidmutter · July 2017

There are good suggestions above on how to match with existing RE records. If all you have in the file being imported are first name, last name and email, I would be cautious of the following instances: Two different people with the same first and last names (e.g. Frank Johnson), nicknames used as first names (e.g. Jim vs James), and spouses using the same email. Additional research may be needed to confirm or deny whether these are the same person/household.

Importing Information Into Raiser's Edge

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