Making data imports easier

CiviCRM's import tools are pretty good.

But have you ever been in a situation like one of these?

• You have a load of data to import as contributions or activities (etc.) to import but because this came from an external source it doesn't have CiviCRM Contact IDs in it.

• You have data to import to contacts but it's a bit of a mess and may result in duplicates, even despite your expertise in using CiviCRM's dedupe rules.

• You have data to import but the name field is just one field instead of first and last names.

There's a newly approved CiviCRM extension that does a pretty good job solving those problems.

It's called CSV Import Helper, and it has some pretty cool features to solve those problems:

You feed it a CSV file, and it helps you identify the contacts for each row, or specify that a new contact should be created.

It starts by suggesting matches for each row, based on name and email — and even makes suggestions based on names that are similar if not identical.

It also only shows distinct sets of names and emails, so if your data has multiple rows for Wilma Flintstone, you'll only have to locate Wilma once.

Once we the contacts are matched up, you can download the CSV file again, in a file that’s the same as your original CSV, but with an extra "Internal ID" column showing the actual CiviCRM Contact ID for each row.

Then you can use that in CiviCRM's native import feature for contacts, activities, contributions.

Now that this extension has passed community review, it's available for easy installation from your city CRM manage extensions page.

You can install it and give it a try, or read more about it here.

All the best,
A.