How can I Import Past Donation History

One of the ways of getting your historical contact records into BetterUnite is to upload them from a CSV file. A CSV file (comma separated view), can be created by saving an Excel file or other spreadsheet file in a CSV format. A CSV file has no formatting, so it is a very common way of working with data sets, especially in import/export scenarios.

If you would like to import your past donations into BetterUnite, prepare a spreadsheet with the donation and contact information, where you may include payment type, date, amount, donor name, last name, email, etc, and then import it into BetterUnite. However, we recommend starting with our provided templates to guide you, so that the import process can be more accurate and quicker.

It is recommended that you first upload your contacts into the system rather trying to upload the donation history all at once. Refer to article How to upload contacts for further details. After the contacts are imported, you only need to have the email address on the donation import file for the system to match it against a unique contact in the system. If your original system has the concept of account numbers, you can also use this as the unique identifier, as long as you also import this in the contact import.

To get started, click Giving in the top navigation area, and select Transactions to see the current donations list.

On the page, locate the Action button and select the "Upload from a file" option.

This will take you to the Upload Donations page, where you will see a link to our starter template file, as well as the action button to start your import process if you already have your import file ready.

Follow the instructions and guidelines on this page in preparing your import file. When your file is ready click on the Browse button and select your prepared file. Below is an example of a prepared file.

When you're ready, click the Import button to upload your file for analysis. The first step in the upload process (selecting your file by clicking the Import button), is the mapping step. Basically BetterUnite takes your file, uploads it to the server, and analyzes it to show the columns we see in the file, as well as some of the first few rows of the data itself just for reference/validation purposes. In the mapping step, you will be able to associate each column in your import file with an attribute of a BetterUnite donation and contact record. For instance, in your import file, you may have named your First Name column as "F.Name", and BetterUnite would now know to associate this with the First Name field of the contact records, so the mapping is where you would tell us this association. Note that when this page first loads, we will try to match fields and their common name variations automatically to give you a head-start on the mapping activity.

On the mapping page you can also specify whether the first row includes header information/column names or not. Based on this, the import may include or ignore the first row so that your columns name row is not inserted as a new contact record.

When you complete the mapping activity, click the appropriate button to start the import process. The import process is an asynchronous process, where the file is submitted, and queued, and the system processes the queue in a few seconds. The total processing time may vary based on the size of your uploaded file. When the import is complete, you will be taken to a summary page where we will display the rows that were attempted to be imported. You will see various colors on each row, based on if that row was imported, updated, or had a warning or an error.

Green: The record is imported successfully

Red: Warning or Error

In the example below the second row has given an error as the campaign name was not entered correctly on this record.

The import process matches on email address and other unique identifiers as explained on the import pages, so if you need to correct any issues on the file you can re import the whole file, and the import process updates any previously created contacts based on the matching criteria. However, as a less risky approach (to avoid potential duplicates), you should take the rows that produced errors and create a new spreadsheet with the corrected rows and import the new spreadsheet as a new import.

Thank you for reading! Let's go do some good.