We are currently setting up a process to export constituent/gift data from Convio and import via IOM to Raiser's Edge.  Our Raiser's Edge database has several e-mail types:  E-Mail, E-Mail Business, E-Mail Spouse, etc., etc. The e-mail address included in the Convio source data may be one of many e-mail types.  My questions are:

Does IOM search and match a source e-mail address against all e-mail types?

What is the best practice for importing new e-mail addresses to existing donor records when the e-mail address does not map to a specific e-mail type?

Thanks for any advice/assistance you can provide.

Regards,

Jenny Bailey, Director of Development Services

Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health  

Hi Jenny,

Great questions. First, make sure you check out this post from Heather at the Second Harvest Food Bank who spent a lot of time going round 'n round with Convio to get a single report that contained all the data she needed. Many clients have trouble finding it so Heather was kind enough to share her knowledge with other Import-O-Matic users.

To answer your question about mapping, IOM will match an incoming email address against ANY email type. So as long as you've mapped the incoming field to an email address in IOM's field mapping it will find any email matches on any address of any constituent.

Regarding mapping to a type, does the file you are importing have an "email type" column next to the "email address" column? If so, you can map this to your email type. If it doesn't exactly match the email types you have in RE, you can use the IOM Dictionary Translation functionality to translate the Convio email types to Raiser's Edge email types.

Please let us know if you have other questions!

Thanks,

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for your response - I had been tracking Heather's inquiries and realized that we were on the right track to import the constituent data and gift data through IOM.  Love it!

To answer your follow-up question, the source data does not include an e-mail type.  I understand how easy it is to add a "e-mail type" column using Access/Excel prior to the IOM import.  The issue is that the Convio donor populates a field entitled "e-mail" (in the Convio environment) and this is basically the donor's decision as to which (and what type) e-mail to provide - it could be a business e-mail or a home e-mail.

Prior to import with IOM, I could add a column for e-mail type and manually populate the field with the appropriate e-mail type but that would be terribly inefficient.

Hmmm, just a suggestion...

If the default e-mail type field was left blank (or you created a new checkbox) so IOM would ask you (during the address processing which e-mail type to utilize when adding a new e-mail to an existing record.

Regards,

Jenny

 

Hi Jenny,

I wasn't suggesting you add a column with Excel, I was just asking if one came with the file. If you were going to give them all the same email type you don't need to add a column, you can just set the default in your IOM profile. So.. just wondering... how do you tell the difference between a home and work email? Also, is there a lot of value in spending the time on it? If they've told you that's the email they want to be contacted on, is there much value to determining work/home? Again, just wondering. I think our users would march on our office with torches and pitchforks if we made a dialog box pop up for each record imported and asked what email type it was! :-)

One other thought, what about making an email type exclusive to that coming in from your website, called "web email" or something? That might help you keep it segregated from your other emails and you'd always know where it came from.

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the suggestion regarding a unique e-mail type - I had considered it - just hadn't quite come to the conclusion that it was the way to go with this project.

I did say "have a checkbox".   I certainly don't want anyone marching with pitchforks!  :) 

thanks again.