Importing your history

What to bring in, and in what order

Most organizations arrive at Fay with history: a membership spreadsheet, a giving list a previous director kept, years of attendance in a filing cabinet. You do not have to retype any of it, and you do not have to bring all of it. Bring the years you can vouch for.

There are three kinds of history and they go in in a fixed order, because each one attaches to the one before it.

1. People first. One row per person: names, contact details, an address, a role, a section, the date they joined. This is the roster, and everything else hangs off it.
2. Then giving. One row per gift. Each is matched to somebody already on file, which is why the roster goes first, a gift imported before its donor exists creates a second copy of that person, and you spend an evening merging.
3. Attendance last, one event at a time. This one is not a spreadsheet of people; it is a ticket import on the event itself. Create the concert, then bring in whatever list you have of who came.

Nothing in any of these is written to your database until you have seen a preview of exactly what will happen and pressed the button that says so.

What the file should look like

A CSV, every spreadsheet program will export one. The first row should name the columns; after that, one row per person or per gift. Nothing needs to be in a particular order, and nothing needs particular names, because you will match columns up yourself on the next screen.

A roster

The only column Fay insists on is a surname. A record with no surname cannot be found again, so those rows are skipped and reported rather than imported as blanks.

Everything else is optional and useful: first name, email, phone, street, city, state, postal code, role, section or voice part, role title, the date they started, and whether they have opted in to email.

Somebody who holds two roles, a board member who also sings alto, gets two rows, one per role. The second row matches the person the first row created rather than duplicating them, as long as the email address is the same on both.

A giving history

Fay needs a surname, an amount and a date. An email address is what makes the match reliable; without one, gifts are matched by name alone and most will need a look afterwards.

Also useful: donor first name, method, check number, campaign, and whether the gift was restricted or anonymous.

Amounts can be written however your spreadsheet wrote them, $1,250.00 and 1250 are read the same way. Dates are read as ISO first (2024-11-14) and American second (11/14/2024), so an unambiguous date is never reinterpreted.

Matching up the columns

After you upload, Fay shows you every column it found and asks which is which. Your spreadsheet can call them anything: “Voice Part”, “Zip”, “Check #”. You point each one at the field it means, and leave the rest as not in my file.

You can change the matching and look again as many times as you like. Nothing is written while you are doing it, so a mapping mistake costs you a click, not an evening.

Words are translated where Fay can be sure of them. A role column saying “Trustee” or “Board Member” becomes a board member; “Singer” and “Chorister” become members. Anything Fay does not recognise is imported as a member rather than guessed at, board membership is what a board report counts, so it is never assumed.

The preview

The preview is the whole point of the import. It tells you, before anything happens:

• how many rows are in the file
• how many matched somebody already on file
• how many people will be created
• how many rows Fay cannot import, and why each one

Read it. A number that surprises you is almost always a column matched to the wrong field, and this is the screen where that is free to fix.

What each row will do

Every row on the preview carries one of four labels.

• Matched: this is somebody already in Fay, found by email address. Their record is updated, not duplicated.
• Will be created: a person Fay has not seen before.
• Needs a look: the email address on this row already belongs to somebody with a different name, or to two people at once. A shared family address does this. Fay creates a new person rather than guessing, and the match queue will offer to join them up afterwards.
• Skipped: something the row needs is missing, named alongside it. A gift with no amount, a person with no surname.

Running an import twice

Safe. Fay deliberately makes a second run of the same file do nothing, because the alternative, a giving history quietly doubling, would corrupt every season total and every lifetime figure your board sees, and nobody would notice until a report looked wrong.

People are matched by email, roles by who holds them and when they started, and gifts by donor, date and amount. There is one honest cost to that last rule: if a donor genuinely gave the same amount twice on the same day, Fay records it once. That is visible to you when you reconcile against the bank, and it is the safer way to be wrong.

Maria’s evening

Maria has run the Riverbend Chorale for eleven years, and for eleven years the roster has lived in a spreadsheet she inherited from the director before her. It has one hundred and four rows, a column called “Voice” that says Sop 1 for some people and Soprano I for others, and a column called “Joined” full of dates in three different formats.

She uploads it. Fay shows her the columns and she points them at the right fields; the section column she leaves as it is, because tidying a hundred and four cells is exactly the job she is trying not to do tonight. The preview says 104 rows, 2 matched, 101 will be created, 1 skipped, a row with no surname, which turns out to be the accidental blank line at the bottom of every spreadsheet anyone has ever kept.

She imports it. The roster is in. Sop 1 and Soprano I are still two different sections, exactly as they were in the spreadsheet, Fay does not silently decide they are the same thing, but now they are two sections she can see, sitting next to each other on the roles tab, which is the first time in eleven years that has been true. Next Tuesday she fixes them in ten minutes.

The giving history goes in the following week. Because the roster is already there, 96 of its 340 gifts land on people Fay already knows, and the ones that do not tell her something she did not know either: four donors who have never once been on the roster, and who nobody has written to in five years.