Integration of "One to Many" records between offline database and Convio

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whatsherlips
whatsherlips ✭
Ancient Membership
in Blackbaud Luminate Online® & Blackbaud TeamRaiser® Discussions

Howdy! I'm new to the Convio Community, so please forgive me if this question has been addressed already elsewhere. Just direct me to that thread and I will happily go there.

My organization is in the process of migrating to Convio from GetActive (woo hoo). We use the Raiser's Edge as our offline database, and will need to be able to synchronize information between the two.

We allow for our constituents to maintain accounts under multiple email addresses (maintaining all of these addresses - up to five - in a single Raiser's Edge Constituent record). Then each email address occupies its own unique GetActive record which is then synchronized through a somewhat tedious process back to Raiser's Edge. So a single offline constituent will often have multiple online database accounts.

If you have any experience with this particular arrangement - what works, what doesn't, traps, glories, etc. - please feel free to comment here. I would love to get some feedback from the community along with the conversations that I am having with our conversion Project Managers.

Thanks so much! And I look forward to our time together in the Convio Community.

Best,

Virginia Baeta

Database and Development Reports Manager

Lambda Legal

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  • Tracie
    Tracie ✭
    Ancient Membership First Reply

    Our company is having the same issues and we've been using Convio since September.

    But are having MAJOR issues when we sync with our offline database, PledgeMaker.

    What do other Convio users do???

  • 2910
    2910 ✭
    Ancient Membership First Reply
    Tracie :

    Our company is having the same issues and we've been using Convio since September.

    But are having MAJOR issues when we sync with our offline database, PledgeMaker.

    What do other Convio users do???

    We too have struggled A LOT with properly coding members of a household in one account in our donor database (we use PIDI's DonorDirect) in Convio. We have recently requested and implemented a change that we think will take care of this problem. We have recently requested a change to our sync so that records in Convio can accept the same offline database account id. But the trick was to change the rules for matching the records in Convio. We had to first understand what rules Convio used and change them to meet our needs. Below is how we do it:

    1. We enter the Convio ID into the records in our donor database. This happens nightly with web gifts, or monthly or so for subscribers who are then matched to donors in the donor database.

    2. We then upload into Convio through a sync, donor database information including the donor database account id following these rules:

    • Allow multiple Convio records to get the same donor account id through an upload.

    • Instead of matching by Convio ID and email address as the sync was doing before, match records based on Convio id only. This way the donor account id will go into multiple Convio records.

    • Match records based on email address ONLY if Convio id is blank. (In case a record with an email address in donor database has not been matched to Convio record yet.)

    • If there are no matchs by either Convio ID or email address, create a new Convio record. (We use this process to upload email addresses we get offline.)

    • If matching on email address and more than one record is found in Convio, write the reocrd to an error file and do nothing. (This way we can deal with duplicates in Convio properly.)

    • We also requested to make the donor account id in Convio an updatable field so we can fix the duplicate records found in the step above.

    Hope this helps.

    Adrienne

  • Tracie
    Tracie ✭
    Ancient Membership First Reply
    Adrienne Stein:

    We too have struggled A LOT with properly coding members of a household in one account in our donor database (we use PIDI's DonorDirect) in Convio. We have recently requested and implemented a change that we think will take care of this problem. We have recently requested a change to our sync so that records in Convio can accept the same offline database account id. But the trick was to change the rules for matching the records in Convio. We had to first understand what rules Convio used and change them to meet our needs. Below is how we do it:

    1. We enter the Convio ID into the records in our donor database. This happens nightly with web gifts, or monthly or so for subscribers who are then matched to donors in the donor database.

    2. We then upload into Convio through a sync, donor database information including the donor database account id following these rules:

    • Allow multiple Convio records to get the same donor account id through an upload.

    • Instead of matching by Convio ID and email address as the sync was doing before, match records based on Convio id only. This way the donor account id will go into multiple Convio records.

    • Match records based on email address ONLY if Convio id is blank. (In case a record with an email address in donor database has not been matched to Convio record yet.)

    • If there are no matchs by either Convio ID or email address, create a new Convio record. (We use this process to upload email addresses we get offline.)

    • If matching on email address and more than one record is found in Convio, write the reocrd to an error file and do nothing. (This way we can deal with duplicates in Convio properly.)

    • We also requested to make the donor account id in Convio an updatable field so we can fix the duplicate records found in the step above.

    Hope this helps.

    Adrienne

    Thanks, Adrienne.

    I've passed the information you sent to me to our IT person and the COnvio data sync people.

    Hopefully, we can do something similar to what you've done.

    Was this personally configured for your company?

    Did the Convio Data Sync people help you with this? Was it an extra cost/

    Thanks.

    Tracie

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