You have two options when considering how to add your historic data to Donor Management - sending your files to our Data Imports Team, or self-importing in the data yourself.
Self-importing data is often the quicker of the two options, but does require some knowledge of Excel and a little bit of additional preparation to make sure the process runs smoothly.
Below, we'll cover how to prepare your data for a self-import, as well as walk you through the process of actually importing your records into Donor Management.
Deciding What Information Belongs in Donor Management
The first step - deciding what information you'd like to send over to be imported - sounds like a no-brainer, but there's a lot to consider!
We recommend reviewing any locations where you store data on your donors and their donations - such as:
Other donor management systems
Excel spreadsheets on your (or your colleagues') computers
Financial management systems, such as Quickbooks
Email clients, such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact
Event management software, such as Eventbrite
Personal contact records, such as those in Gmail or Outlook
If you're just getting started and don't have information in any of these locations - that's okay! You can get started by manually adding contacts into the system instead, such as your board members, volunteers, colleagues - even your own family!
The Network for Good Data Import Team strongly recommends that you export or download all data from your former donor management system, whether or not you ultimately decide to send your files to Network for Good for assistance in the importing process. This allows you to have a complete archive of your former system, in the event that a field is overlooked during the import process.
Downloading the Standard Importing Template
To make things easier for you, our Data Import Team has created a downloadable spreadsheet that you can use as a template for importing data into Donor Management.
You can download this spreadsheet by clicking on this link.
You can also find a downloadable version of this spreadsheet in Donor Management – you should see an option to download the template on the second step of the import process.
This spreadsheet is only meant to be a guide – but it’s a helpful guide to see exactly what information you might want to include in your records.
It’s also a helpful way to see how to format that information so it will import into Donor Management as smoothly as possible; the closer your data is to the template’s formatting, the faster your import process will go.
Cleaning your Data Files
Auditing and cleaning your historic data may seem like a challenge, but we recommend taking some time to do so before importing anything into Donor Management. Not only does it help speed up the process for whomever is processing the import, it also gives you control on where you’d like to see certain fields created and listed in the system later on.
Cleaning the data also helps make sure that the data you’re adding to your brand-new system is as accurate as possible. Uploading incomplete or incorrect data can result in higher email bounce rates, more mail returned to sender, and an overall loss of integrity of your contact’s data.
Trust us – it's a lot easier to clean up your records beforehand!
Here’s a couple of additional tips to getting that historic data clean:
Remove any unnecessary fields by deleting empty or irrelevant columns.
Like we discussed a moment ago, you can delete any columns from your data that you don’t plan on importing into Donor Management. In many cases, this is a column that’s tracking outdated or irrelevant information; it can also be a blank column that was included when you exported out your historic files.
Either way, deleting those fields will streamline your data and make it easier to continue cleaning and updating your information.
Review your data for any duplicate contacts or records.
While we’ve discussed the ways that Donor Management finds and addresses potential duplicates, we also recommend taking some time reviewing your data prior to import to try to find and minimize those potential duplicate records.
We recommend this for two major reasons: firstly, because you know your data best and will be able to quickly identify and resolve duplicates on your own – and secondly, because reviewing potential duplicates can’t be done in bulk through Donor Management, and you may be able to save yourself time if you review them beforehand. (This is especially important if you’re submitting multiple spreadsheets for import!)
One important thing to note – each donation made by a contact will have its own individual donation record. You should be extra careful when reviewing donation records for duplicates, as it’s possible that two separate donation records may appear to be duplicates when in actuality, they’re completely different.
If your historic data includes a unique ID number for each donor, you can also include that in the “External ID” field in your template. This can help minimize duplicates, and can help make sure historic donations correspond to the correct donor!
Separate organization contact records from individual contact records.
Organizational contacts are treated differently than individual contact records in our importing process. We recommend saving all organizational contacts in a separate Excel file (not tab!) to make it easier for our Import Team to process those correctly.
Remember, organization contact records must be imported in by our Import Team – they can’t be imported in bulk on your own. This means that either way you choose to import data to Donor Management, you’ll need to submit that organization contact file to the team for processing.
Save your import files in the correct file format.
In order to import a file into Donor Management, the file needs to be saved as either an Excel document (.xls or .xlsx), or a Comma Separated Value document (.csv). You may need to change the file format on your historic files to match one of those two formats before you can begin importing into Donor Management.
Make sure your data includes the required fields for each type of record.
Each type of record has a certain set of fields that are necessary to be successfully added to Donor Management. You’ll want to make sure that you’re including those required fields for each record, so that you don’t run into any errors during the import process.
Contacts: Each contact record needs to have a first name (or, if no first name is available, an email address needs to be listed in the “first name” field.) While it isn’t required, we also recommend having an email or physical address for each contact record as well, to make sure that you have a way to communicate with this individual later on.
Donations: Each donation record needs to have some way to be associated with a contact record – in most cases, this is by the donor’s email address, but some organizations instead use a field like internal ID to make that association. Donation records also need to include the exact date of the donation (MM/DD/YYYY), the amount, and the payment method used to make the transaction. If you don’t know the date of a donation, you can always enter it as January 1st of the current year.
Review the template to make sure that your existing columns correspond to the template’s fields.
You’ll want to make sure that each column in your existing data records corresponds to a column header in the downloadable template (such as “First Name,” “email address,” etc.)
If you find that you have a column in your existing records that doesn’t correspond with the template, you have two options.
If you’d like to keep that information stored in Donor Management, you can create what’s called a “custom field” to retain that data. (We’ll go over how to create a custom field in an upcoming module.)
Alternatively, if you find that that information might not be necessary to include in your import, you can delete the entire column from your data.
Self-Importing your Files into Donor Management
Once your files have been cleaned and you're confident with their accuracy, you can start the self-import process directly from your Donor Management platform!
From either the "Contacts" or "Giving" tabs (located in the left-hand navigation), you'll want to click on the white "Import" button in the top-right corner.
The page should then reload, and display several options for how you might want to proceed with your import. You'll want to select the "import your spreadsheet" option, then click the blue "Next" button in the top-right corner.
If you are importing data from either Constant Contact or PayPal, you do have the option to select one of those related options; however, if you run into any issues, we recommend trying the "import your spreadsheet" option.
Once your file has been uploaded, you'll be asked to "map" your fields. "Mapping" is the process of choosing which column on your spreadsheet corresponds to each field in Donor Management.
Some columns will be automatically mapped, as Donor Management will try to find matches - but we recommend double checking to make sure that everything looks accurate and that the system has automatically mapped everything correctly.
You can re-map a column by clicking on the blue "Edit Column" located above the respective column, and then typing or selecting the correct Donor Management field.
You also have the option to "ignore" a column you'd rather not import into Donor Management by clicking that "Edit Column" button, and checking the box labeled "Ignore."
After all of your columns have been mapped, you can click the blue "Next" button in the top-right corner to proceed. (You will need to map or ignore all columns to be able to move to the next step, so be sure to review the data carefully!)
Next, you'll be asked to do a final review before the import actually begins. If anything looks incorrect, you can always go back and perform one of the previous steps to make changes.
When everything looks good, you can now click the blue "I'm Ready, Let's Import" button.
You'll then see a screen that shows you the progress of that import, but you'll also receive an email confirmation when the import has finished processing - so don't feel like you need to stay on that screen!
The larger the import file, the longer that the import process will take - but we do anticipate that most import files shouldn't take more than an hour. If your import is processing for more than a few hours and you haven't received an email, we recommend contacting our Support team for further assistance.
You'll also receive an email that includes a detailed report of any errors that happened during the import. Rows of data containing errors are not included in an import process, so you may need to make some adjustments and re-import those particular records - but all "correct" records will already be imported and won't need further processing.
Here's a short video walkthrough of the process in action!