Importing Updates to Existing Records
You can import a file that updates existing records in your Donor Tools donor database. This is helpful for doing bulk contact updates and NCOA change of address updates.
Blank Values
Be careful when importing spreadsheets with blank values. Donor Tools interprets blank values literally. For example, if you upload a spreadsheet with a blank value for “street address”, Donor Tools will erase the street address for that donor.
How Donor Tools Matches Existing Person Records
There are four ways that Donor Tools will try to look up an existing Person record in your database:
- ID: This is Donor Tools ID number, the primary key by which Donor Tools looks up this person record. If you have the Donor Tools ID (for example, if you’ve downloaded your People list from Donor Tools and made modifications in a spreadsheet program), then this is the preferred method.
- Legacy ID: This is the ID number from your old database. If you previously imported data that included the Legacy ID, and if the spreadsheet that you’re uploading now contains the legacy ID, then you can use this method.
- Email Address: Donor Tools will try to look up an existing Person record by email address.
- Name: Donor Tools will try to find an existing record by name.
If more than one potential match is found, then a duplicate Person record will be created with the data that you’re importing right now. You can always merge the duplicate records together.
