Contact info cleanup: Practical prep for year-end outreach

Dani Cluff: We’ll give it just a minute as everybody gets logged on. Good afternoon or good morning, depending on where you’re logging in from. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today.

Happy Veterans Day. A special shout out and a huge thank you to any veterans who are on the call today. Thank you so much for your service. I know we over at Bloomerang appreciate you for the sacrifice you and your family have given.

As we roll into this busy time of year, I appreciate everybody taking time out of their days to join us. If you want to drop where you’re logging in from and maybe something you’re looking forward to this time of year, whether that’s some GivingTuesday campaigns that you’ve put together or just something fun that you appreciate about the fall season.

As we get more people logged on, I’m going to go ahead and get things going to make sure that Megan has enough time to get through all the wonderful content that she’s put together for us today. So today, we’re going to be going over contact info cleanup, practical prep for your year end outreach. Could not be a better time for this topic. So thank you so much, Megan, for joining us today.

We are recording today’s session, so you will get an email after the session with the recording and some resources that are pertinent to the topic Megan will be going over. If you have any questions, go ahead and use the Q&A area. That’s going to be the easiest place for us to keep track of those, and then we’ll get to those after Megan goes through all of her content. If you want to chat with your peers or with Megan and me throughout the webinar today, put that in the chat. We’d love to hear from you.

For those of you who are not familiar with Bloomerang, we are an all in one giving platform. We have fundraising solutions, volunteer, and CRM. If there’s anything that your organization could benefit from, especially rolling into GivingTuesday and year end fundraising, please reach out to our team. We would love to know how we can help empower your mission and help you raise more.

And if you haven’t heard, we are putting on GiveCon again. Next year, in 2026, it will be in Saint Louis. We are super excited for the event. It’s a great time for fundraisers and industry consultants and agency partners to get together and not only encourage each other, but learn more about how we can better serve our nonprofits and how we can raise more.

We’ve heard enough from me today. Megan, I don’t want to take up any more of your time. I’ll hand things over to you.

Megan Collins: Thank you so much for coming to Contact Info Cleanup: Practical Prep for Year-End Outreach.

A little bit about me. I’ve been with Bloomerang for almost six years. It’ll be six years in February. I was first on the customer support team, so I know the Bloomerang CRM product very well. Now I’m on the conversions team, so I know the data side of things very well also. Before joining Bloomerang, I gained customer service, administrative, and event management skills in the hospitality industry through various roles at world class hotels and attractions. I also have a bachelor of arts in sociocultural anthropology, so that’s a lot of fun.

What we’re going to go over today is an overview, and then the three steps of our contact info cleanup, which will be bulk update, investigation and manual update, and segmentation. I will then dive into Bloomerang CRM and show a practical demonstration of how to go about some of these steps, and then we’ll have a Q&A. Dani, if we have any pressing questions about a specific place where I’m still in, please feel free to interrupt me and ask, because I do like to answer those if they’re pertinent as we go.

Here is our overview. The importance of cleanup: despite your best efforts, messy data does happen. Doing the dirty work now benefits you in the long run by saving you money on postage and positively impacting your email sending reputation. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically the reputation the internet gives you for not delivering to bad email addresses and delivering successfully to valid email addresses. It impacts your ability for your messages to make it to your constituents’ inboxes.

It also maintains your constituents’ trust in you, that you’re able to contact them with the correct information. Say, for example, one of their household members has passed away, and you’ve updated their greetings to reflect that. That maintains their trust that you have your finger on the pulse. You know what’s going on.

And it also allows you to reengage with constituents who have fallen through the cracks. I know a lot of customers use our online forms and also external integrations. Sometimes when information comes through those channels, say someone who gives all the time accidentally puts their address in wrong, the most recently inputted address is the one that becomes the primary. So now that person who has always been receiving mail from you is no longer receiving mail, because their address is invalid just because of a typo. This type of cleanup can allow you to say, “Oh, I have a better address for this person. Let me switch that one back to primary so that person is back in contact with you.”

There is a three-step process that I’ve put together. The first is to update contact info in bulk. We’ll be utilizing the database export and front end reports, which will allow you to see all contact info in one place. Those of you who are familiar with Bloomerang’s front end reports know that you can’t always see all of the constituents’ addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in one place. Utilizing the database export does allow you to do that.

The second step will be to investigate and manually update constituent info. There are still items that need your discernment and personal touch. Say, for example, that household that has had a family member pass away. You’ll need to manually update their greetings to reflect that. You just need to know where to look and what to do.

The last step is, once you have everything set up correctly, everyone has their good addresses and salutations set up correctly, we can create segmentations to identify specific groups of constituents that need to be contacted in a certain way. For example, people who have a phone number but don’t have a mailing address or email address. Those would be good candidates if you’re having a phone-a-thon. They would probably be at the top of the list.

Here are some suggested reports. Dani will be sending out both this slide deck and a ZIP file full of instructions that show you step by step how to create these reports. It also shows you step by step how to go through the editing and imports for the bulk update.

For bulk update, some suggested reports are constituents with a bad primary email address but a valid secondary email address, or constituents with a bad primary mailing address but valid secondary mailing addresses. That’s the situation I talked about, where maybe they made a typo the last time they submitted our online form. This would allow you to identify that this person does have a valid address that’s not being used. I should probably switch that back.

For investigation and manual update, there’s living constituents with deceased spouses. And if you utilize our TrueGivers national change of address integration, you can find constituents that have been marked bad by TrueGivers and investigate. See if there’s another way you can reach out to that constituent and say, “Hey, I have this address for you. Is this address correct? Do I need to update this? Have you moved?” Et cetera.

For segmentation, once you have everything set, you can look at households who have mailing addresses but no other contact info, email addresses but no other contact info, and phone numbers but no other contact info.

These are just some examples of helpful reports for these steps. If you have different segmentations you want to make, or different updates you want to make, this is just a framework.

Some of the reporting is a bit high level. Even though there are step-by-step instructions that will be provided to you, you might still get stuck, and that’s totally okay. That’s what support is here to help with. I was in support for two and a half years, and the report instructions and the import help were actually my favorite calls, emails, and phone calls.

Support can help you build these reports. They can review your prepped files once you’ve edited them, and I’ll show you how to edit them. They can help you import those files back into Bloomerang. They can help you edit constituent profiles in Bloomerang if you get stuck while updating salutations, things like that. And they can help you navigate your TrueGivers or NCOA data.

What support is unfortunately not able to help with is Microsoft Excel functionality, since that is not software that we manage. Unless something has changed since I was in support, support doesn’t even have Microsoft Excel. They use Google Sheets, so they might not be familiar with the specific commands that you might want to use. They also aren’t able to help with determining exactly which phones, addresses, or emails you should mark as primary. That’s something you’ll need to look at your data and determine, saying, “Okay, this is a vacation address. I don’t think I want to make this primary. Let’s see if they have any other valid addresses.”

The first step is going to be bulk update. This is just an overview. If you don’t understand everything that’s going on in these steps at first, that’s totally fine. This is the one I’m going to spend the most time on with a practical demonstration in a little while.

There are four steps to the bulk update. First, you’re going to download a database export. Then you’ll build and export your reports. You’ll edit your exports in Excel or Google Sheets or Numbers or whichever spreadsheet software you use. And then you’ll import that back into Bloomerang.

Why we need to do this, even though it seems very tedious, is because when you have a spreadsheet full of addresses, even though those constituents already exist in Bloomerang, when you import those addresses back to those constituents, even if they already have that address on their account, the most recently imported address becomes the primary, just like the most recently entered address on an online form. Using this process, we’re able to update a large number of constituents all at once.

Step one is downloading the database export. In Bloomerang CRM, in the left-hand sidebar, click Settings. If you don’t see Settings, that means you don’t have the permission level to pull this, so you might want to ask someone else at your organization. In Settings, select Organization and scroll down to the data export section. This will export CSV files for all your data. CSV is a standardized version of a spreadsheet that you can open in Excel or Google Sheets or Numbers or whatever software you use. Click the Create New Export button. It will allow you to download a ZIP file, which is a folder full of CSV files. It’s going to look something like this over here on the right. Locate the ZIP file in your downloads and unzip it. I’m not familiar with how it is on Mac, but on PC you should be able to right click and select unzip. That will get all of those files out for you.

For step two, you’ll create your reports. You’ll want to ensure that the only remaining columns in your report are account number, name, and household name. The reason for that is that constituent reports usually come with the primary address and primary email address, but we already have our addresses coming from the database export. So we don’t need that, and we don’t want to get confused. Once you’ve created your report, you’ll save and export to Excel or the equivalent software you use.

For step three, you’re going to edit your exports in Excel. Some helpful functions you may want to use are the VLOOKUP function, duplicate values, and freeze top row. VLOOKUP, in particular, can be a little confusing if you’re not familiar with it, but there are lots of great resources, like very quick but very comprehensive walkthroughs on YouTube. If you just Google “how to use VLOOKUP in Excel,” you’ll find some great resources there. You’ll follow the instructions in the instruction sheet, which Dani will be sending out to you a little bit later today. Once you’ve made your edits, you’ll save as a CSV and import your data back into Bloomerang, following that same instruction sheet.

The next step, once you’ve made sure everyone has their correct primary contact information, is investigation and manual update. For this, there’s no exporting and importing. It’s just finding a list of constituents and seeing who needs my attention. The suggested reports I’ve come up with are living constituents with deceased spouses, and constituents whose only mailing addresses have been marked bad by TrueGivers. Then you would reach out to that constituent if necessary and say, “Do I have the correct information for you? What should I have instead if this doesn’t work?” Things like that. And then you’ll update the profiles manually.

Our last step is segmentation. Now we have all of our contact info and our salutations the way we want them. You can run these reports and then save them if you’re going to send out letters or bulk emails, or use them as a reference for a phone-a-thon, things like that.

Dani Cluff: Hey, Megan. Before you continue on, I just want to confirm. Amy in the chat said that if the export includes the account numbers and you keep those account numbers in the spreadsheet, it shouldn’t create dupes, as she understands. Is that correct?

Megan Collins: That’s correct. Yes. This process should not be creating any new constituents. I like to put the account number field in the report itself, but even if you don’t, when you export, it’ll automatically add the account number field for you.

Dani Cluff: Perfect. And you used the phrase TrueGivers earlier. Can you just explain what that means for everybody on the webinar?

Megan Collins: Yeah. TrueGivers is basically a middleman between the US Postal Service and us. Their whole purpose is to make sure nonprofits have the correct mailing address contact information for their donors. Most Bloomerang CRM packages do have this included, and you can activate it through your settings if you haven’t already. When I do my practical demonstration, once we do the bulk import, I’ll show how to access that and how to turn it on if you haven’t already.

Dani Cluff: Perfect. I’ve got one more question right here, and then I’ll let you continue on. What is the best way to create a data file? Would it be using individual persons or creating households, or is there an easier way to identify households? If this is something you’re going to talk about later, feel free to just say so.

Megan Collins: As you can see in the screenshot over here, this one says household filters. By default, a constituent report is by constituent. So this bottom constituent here, Jonathan and Martha Kent, if you’re filtering by household, it’ll show them as one entity, as their household entity. If you were to go by constituent, you would have them on separate lines: Jonathan Kent and Martha Kent. For the vast majority of these reports, you want to keep it as constituent. If you should be changing it to household, the instructions will tell you. For most of them, it will be constituent. The reason for that is you can’t import information directly to households. You can only import information directly to constituents. If you update the constituents within that household, that information will then automatically show up on the household when you’re ready to do your mailings.

Dani Cluff: Fantastic. Thanks. We’ve got a few more questions, but we’ll let you keep going, and we’ll try to group those in later.

Megan Collins: Sounds good.

Let’s go ahead and do a practical demonstration. I’ve still got my fun autumn background here. I used to live in Florida, where there was no fall. Now I live in Indiana, where there are four seasons, and I love doing everything for the seasons, even though I’m really excited for Christmas.

For the practical demonstration, I’m going to start with constituents with bad primary mailing addresses but valid secondary mailing addresses, which is probably the most complicated. If you get that instruction sheet later, you can always come back and watch to see the steps.

Here is my report that I’ve already built, and again, the instructions will be sent out to you for how to create these reports. This is by constituent, and it’s constituents that have bad or incomplete primary addresses but also have addresses that are not bad and not primary, or not incomplete and not primary. It’s a little weird in the reporting language, but basically they have a bad primary but good secondary or secondaries. I’ve added my account number, name, and household name here just for my reference. I’m going to save and export to Excel.

I also already have my database export downloaded. That process is in Settings, Organization, and you scroll down to database export to get that. So now I have my report and my database export.

I’m going to blow this up a little bit. I have a very large monitor, so it might be hard for you to see. I’m not making it full screen so I can easily go back and forth between files for the VLOOKUP function.

For those of you who aren’t confident using Excel or Numbers or Google Sheets at all, you could just go to this report and say, “Okay, it looks like this person meets the criteria I’m looking for. I’m going to open them up in a new tab and see what’s going on here. There’s their bad primary address, and there’s their good secondary address. I’m just going to change the primary here if applicable.” You can always do that if you have a small number of constituents or you’re just more confident doing it this way. But for a large number of constituents, we’ve got this report.

I’m going to open my database export. I’ve got all of my files here, and I’ll open my addresses file. I’ll make that large as well and auto fit the column width so that I can see everything.

This is actually all of the constituents in my database. The database export is for all constituents in my database. I just want the ones from my report. So what I’m going to do is a VLOOKUP. The lookup value is what I want it to reference. I want it to look at this account number. The table array is where I want it to look for it, and that’s the account number field in my export. The column index number is which column I want to look at. I’ve only selected one column, so it’s one. And range lookup is always false. For the purpose of these, your column index number is probably most often going to be one, but there are some great resources online that show you the logic behind this.

I got a one, which means that this person is in that file. If I pull it down, I now have people who are excluded, so I know not all of my constituents are in here. That’s good. We’ve narrowed it down. Let’s filter that, and filter out all of the people I don’t need to be looking at.

You can also use VLOOKUP if you want to add names to your report, if you want to see who account number one is. I’ll paste those values. Excel is always so picky. Then I’ll do another VLOOKUP. I want it to look for this account number, and I want it to pull from the same line as that account number. I’m going to choose both of those columns, so it populates the second column I chose. Range lookup is always false. Now I can actually see who I am working with.

You can also rearrange these columns if it’s too confusing to have street all the way over here and city over here. If you want them to be in order, you can do that. It doesn’t matter what order the columns are in.

You’ll also see we have the Is Bad and Is Primary fields. We know that all of these people have bad primary addresses, so I’m going to get rid of all of the bad ones. If it’s true, I don’t want it. Now all of the ones that are left are their secondary addresses.

I’m going to go through here line by line and see if there are any duplications. Another trick you can use is the duplicate values tool. It’s looking at the whole column, so we’d probably need to make a new column for that. Since I have a small dataset, I’m just going to go as is. For those of you who are very confident using Excel or Google Sheets or Numbers, you may think of ways to do this that make more sense to you. That’s totally fine. There are many correct ways to do things, and things that make sense to one person might not make sense to somebody else. If you’re going through this thinking, “I know a way better way to do this,” you’re more than welcome to do so. It depends on your confidence level. This is just how my brain interprets it best.

Looking at the first one, Melissa. She’s got two secondary addresses that are good. One of them is a work address, and one is a vacation address. I don’t think I want to use that vacation address, because she’s probably not there very often. She’s probably a snowbird or something, or the vacation address could have been inputted incorrectly. It’s a risk to use vacation addresses. I’m going to say it’s better to contact her at work than to not contact her at all, so I’ll keep the work address.

What we’re going to do is remove any addresses that we don’t want to make primary. This is not removing the address completely from Bloomerang. This is just telling Bloomerang what I want to make primary. I don’t want to make this vacation address primary, so I’ll remove it. Right click and delete row.

These three look good. Jason has one good secondary address, and it is a vacation address, but that’s all I have for him. I’m going to make the decision to keep that vacation address. It’s better to have the chance to reach him than not at all. Everything else looks good here.

The Dursleys all have both home and vacation addresses, but their home address is good. Vernon Dursley has a good home address, and I probably have a better chance of reaching him at home, so I’m going to remove all of those vacation addresses. Arthur Weasley has two addresses, one work and one home. I probably want to keep the home one if I have it, so I’ll keep that. The vast majority of these were constituents that were loaded into my demo database when I started at Bloomerang. Actually, all Bloomerang employees have most of these same constituents in their database. I guess the people who originally created the demo database really liked fantasy characters. So I’ve got George Weasley, and a whole bunch of work addresses. Let’s keep the home ones. These people all just have the one.

Do I have any other duplicates? It looks like I do not. This is the list that I want. I’m going to put it in a new tab, just to make sure I don’t overwrite something that’s already in this file.

I can remove these two columns, since I don’t need them anymore. The instruction sheet tells you which columns to keep. I can remove these. I can remove this. There’s not going to be anything in the county field for hardly anybody. Apparently, this is a field that we used to have in Bloomerang but was removed almost immediately after the software launched, which I don’t understand. I went down a rabbit hole about this yesterday. There is a suggestions portal item that you can vote on to reinstate this field. That’s accessed by clicking the question mark in the top right corner of your database and going to Suggestions. We’ll get rid of that too.

Wait, actually, hold on. I did not copy over the type. That’s what I get for having my screen so big. Back on track.

When you import into Bloomerang, you can import to the home address fields, the work address fields, or the vacation address fields. We want to make sure that we’re keeping work addresses as work, vacation addresses as vacation, and home addresses as home. So what I’m going to do is separate that into three different files. Again, this is all in the instructions for you. Let’s filter. Let’s take all of my home addresses. We’ll take all of my work addresses. Excel didn’t like that I rearranged. There we go. I’ll add another sheet and then all of my vacation addresses. I’m not going to blow these up, because all I’m doing here is saving them.

I’m going to do File, Save As, and make sure it’s in CSV format. I’ll save it as Home Addresses. For the demonstration, I’m just going to do home addresses, but you’ll do the same process for work and for vacation. I know there are multiple sheets. I just want this one.

Now we’re going back into Bloomerang, and we’re going to go to Import under Data Tools. We’ll do a new import. This is going to be home addresses, so I’ll name it “new primary home addresses.” I’m importing constituents, and I’m going to select individual. It’s okay if there are organizations in your list. If you’re matching by account number, it doesn’t matter which one you pick. The only reason it would matter is if you’re trying to match by name and contact info, which we’re not doing. We have the account numbers. These constituents already exist. We don’t need to worry about that.

Upload the file you want to import. There’s my Home Addresses CSV that I just saved. Now this is the step where Bloomerang will read your file and say, “Here is where I think everything should go.” That’s why we want to make sure that our name field is not there. Even though first name and last name are technically required fields, we’re matching by account number, and we don’t need those. If we left those name columns in there, they’d match to the name fields. Since it’s matching by account number, it would actually update those names and change them to whatever you had in your file, which we absolutely do not want. The names are fine. We’re keeping the names as is. So we just want to match by account number.

I’ll go through here. I’ve got street, city, state, ZIP, and country. This all looks correct. It’ll say “no name” over here in the preview. That’s fine. That’s just because they couldn’t find a name in the file, but we know it’s going to the right constituent because of the account number.

I’ll do Next. Zero new constituents will be added. That’s what we want to see. If you’re at this step and it says constituents will be added, put the brakes on and see if you can find out why. If you can’t, feel free to go to support, and they’ll be able to help you out. Five existing constituents will be updated. Perfect.

This step over here, “trust what’s in my file versus trust what’s in the database,” only really matters if you’re trying to fill in holes in addresses or in custom fields. If you have an incomplete address and want to fill in those address fields, or you want to fill in a custom field based on what’s in your file and not what’s already in the database, that’s when we’d say trust what’s in my file. This doesn’t apply here, because these addresses are already in Bloomerang. We’re just saying I want this one primary.

We’ll go ahead and run it. You will not be able to undo this. This is the part where, if you have any misgivings whatsoever, go ahead and reach out to support. They will be happy to help you. In fact, I always recommend reaching out to support if you have any questions at this stage. Even people who have been with Bloomerang for ten years will come to support and say, “Here’s my import file. This is what I want to happen. I just want to make sure that what I want to happen is what’s actually going to happen.” We’ll check it, and we’ll say, “Yep, looks good. Go ahead.”

So I’m going to run. My import is complete. Yay. Now I can look at some of the people who are in that file. It looks like it was the Dursleys. Let me go to Vernon Dursley here. Hooray. Now we have a good primary address, so we know that when we send out that mailing, he’s going to get it. That’s what we want. That is how the bulk update step works. Again, you will get the instruction sheets that break it down click by click.

We don’t have too much time left, so I’m just going to show you quickly. The segmentation is pretty self-explanatory. For example, constituents who have a phone number but no other contact info. Great, I’ve created my segmentation. Here are the people I want to add to my phone-a-thon. All done.

Then there’s the middle step, investigation and manual update: living constituents with deceased spouses. I have people who are not deceased but have a spouse who is deceased. I came up with one result here. Greg Apple, and it looks like his spouse is Susie, and Susie is deceased. What I’m going to want to do is check their household and make sure that all communication is just going to Greg from here on out. We don’t want to address it to Greg and Susie, just to Greg. We can see here all of the salutation info is for Greg and Susie. I want to change it to just Greg, so I’m going to edit. Let’s take Susie out. So we’ve got Mr. Greg Apple. And the recognition name, just Greg Apple. The household name did not update, so I should probably fix that. There we go.

Susie still exists. She still has the relationship, and she’s still in the household. But when I reach out to Greg, it’s just going to be his name. That feeds into increasing constituents’ trust in you. Maybe Susie passed away fifteen years ago. Greg is going to have much more trust in you as an organization if you’re addressing things to just him instead of addressing things to Susie when she passed away fifteen years ago. That’s why these manual update type things are so important.

Dani Cluff: Hey, Megan. Before you hop on to the next one, somebody did ask: is the best practice on something like this example to have two records within a household?

Megan Collins: Yes. Two records within the household would be the best practice. You’ll want to have an individual account for each person.

Dani Cluff: Perfect. I know somebody mentioned that they’ve been disbanding the household versus editing the household itself. Do you have any recommendations on which way to go in that sort of situation?

Megan Collins: Do not disband the households. The reason we have households is that we can track data that is happening with each constituent and with the household as a whole. Especially when you create your tax statements, that’s done by household. You want to be able to say, “Greg and Susie,” pretending Susie’s still alive for this example, “you file your taxes together. I want to make sure that all of your information is going onto the tax letter together and that you’re addressing it to both Greg and Susie.” But say Susie is a volunteer with your organization, and she doesn’t just donate, she volunteers too. You want to have a separate timeline for Susie so you can see all of her volunteer interactions. That’s why it’s important to use the household system as intended.

Dani Cluff: Fantastic. Thank you.

Megan Collins: You’re welcome. I’m just going to touch on this briefly because we still have Q&A. Let’s do constituents whose only mailing addresses have been marked bad by TrueGivers. The instructions for this report are in the instructions that will be sent to you as well. You can see there’s a note on here: “updated as nonmailable.” This is where you would say, “Okay, Mallory Archer, I have a phone number for you, but your address is bad.” You’d call up Mallory and say, “The US Postal Service is saying that your address is not mailable. This is the address that I have for you. Is that the correct address?” She’ll probably say, “Oh, no, I’ve moved. I just forgot to update my forwarding address.” You’ll say, “Great, what’s your new address?” and you can put it in manually. This is another instance of picking up the stragglers.

For that NCOA integration, if you have it, go to Settings, Integrations, then Integrated Partners, and then go to Settings. Mine is already activated. If you haven’t activated it, you’ll see the prompt to activate it. You can also go into your NCOA dashboard and see a lot of insight about your constituents there, but I won’t go too far into that. Dani, I will give you a link to our TrueGivers help documents to send out as well, since that’s relevant. Since we don’t have too much time left, I wanted to jump into our Q&A.

Dani Cluff: Absolutely. Thanks, Megan. Before we get started on Q&A, I’m going to launch a quick poll in case you would like to receive more information from Bloomerang. Actually, I have to move it over. I forgot I made you the host, so it’s under yours right now. Let me take that over real quick.

Megan Collins: Yeah. Go ahead and take it back. I don’t need to share anymore.

Dani Cluff: Perfect. We’ve got that going, and then we’ll jump over to some questions for Megan. Is there any way to mass update donations or to put them under one appeal or campaign tag?

Megan Collins: Yes, there is. Is my screen still sharing even though I’m not the host?

Dani Cluff: It is. So hopefully that’ll keep working for you.

Megan Collins: Okay. Yes, you can. We have a bulk update tool. If you go to Data Tools, Bulk Update, you can create a bulk update. This is for transactions. It will allow you to filter for transactions. Say I have a program fund and either I put that in incorrectly or we’re merging funds into something else. I’ll say fund is Program Fund. Now I have all of my donations here that I want to update. I’m going to remove pledge payment or soft credit, because I want everything to update. I’ll go next. What do you want to update? Fund, campaign, or appeal. I want to update the fund. Say we’re merging with my Health and Research fund, so I’ll choose Health and Research. We’ll update transactions, and now it is updating those transactions in bulk for me. Dani, I will give you a link to our documentation on that as well.

Dani Cluff: Perfect. We’ll go on to another question. How would you know if you have duplicate profiles, or profiles that have never given, or if there’s contact info you want to get rid of? Is there an easy way to identify that?

Megan Collins: Yes. If you have the criteria that you want but you’re not sure how to create the report, you can go to support and say, “Here’s the report that I want to make. Can you help me make this?” They can help you make that report. Then you can go through the same exact steps that I just went through with the report that you made. That’s why my reports are suggested reports. What was the criteria? People who’ve never given?

Dani Cluff: Yes.

Megan Collins: Okay. I’ll just do that real quick. I’ll say people who have, so, “has transactions.” Some of you may know this already, but we currently have two “has transactions” filters. That is a bug that our engineering team is working on fixing. Both of them work exactly the same. It doesn’t matter which one you pick. So, “has no transactions.” You can also add filters for has no address, has no phone number, has no email address, things like that. That’ll get you your list. When you export it and cross-reference it with the data export, you can use that as your criteria.

Dani Cluff: Fantastic. I know somebody asked: you had mentioned you don’t have to include first and last names in the import. Is there any harm to including them?

Megan Collins: Yes. Let me show you what will happen here real quick. In my files, I only included the name. Let me make sure this is a CSV. It’s an Excel workbook, and I want to save it as a CSV. I actually want that in my folder. If I go to my import, I don’t want to save that report. I’m just going to do “example,” since we don’t have so much time.

If I leave the name field in there, thank goodness, it didn’t actually put it in first name and last name. But sometimes it can pick up on a field that has a name in it and put it in here. Since I only have one name field, if it mapped first name equals name and last name equals name, then when I update by account number, the name would be “Sterling Mallory Archer” as the first name and “Sterling Mallory Archer” as the last name. That’s why we don’t want to use the name fields at all in these imports. Even if you have a first name and last name, just to be safe, if you’re matching by account number, I always recommend taking the name fields out of your import file.

Dani Cluff: Fantastic. I know we’re at the top of the hour, so we do have to get back to our days and make sure everybody has a wonderful rest of their day. If you did not get your question answered today, or more questions pop up, as Megan shared many times, please reach out to the support team. They are always happy to help and help you navigate all of your questions. We will be sending the recording out today, so go back and watch it. We’ll have the handouts coming your way later today.

Megan Collins: And support also has a copy of the slides and a copy of the handouts. They’re all aware that this webinar is happening today. So if you reach out to support later today, or even later this week, and say, “I went to the contact info cleanup webinar. I’m trying to build this report,” they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about and immediately be on the same page and help you out with that.

Dani Cluff: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Megan, for putting all of that together for everyone today. And thank you so much, everyone, for joining us and taking time out of your days. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

Megan Collins: Yes. Bye. Bye.