2. Contacts Data Preparation Instructions

2. Contacts Data Preparation Instructions

Type of information that goes in this tab of the template:

This template is for ALL the records in your data that will end up as CONTACTS in Sumac. Here are some examples of what a CONTACT may be:
  1. an entity that makes DONATIONS and receives charitable tax receipts (Individual or Institutional donors)
  2. a volunteer 
  3. a solicitor or other staff member
  4. a client of your organization
  5. a participant of one of your programs
  6. a recipient of your services
  7. a household 
  8. an organization
or any entity that you collect contact information for (i.e. phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses). 

How the information entered in this tab will be handled:

  1. Every single row will be imported as a separate CONTACT record. 
  2. Every column in this tab represents a field in the CONTACT record in Sumac. 
  3. If you do not track information that belongs in a particular column in the template, leave that column blank.

Organizations

If you are entering an organization as a contact
    1. Enter the name of the organization into the Last Name / Organization Name field AND the Business Organization field
    2. please enter "Organization" in Gender column. (see row number 10 in the example pictured below)
    3. If you have an individual who is your primary contact at the organization, put their name into the "Business Recipient" field
    4. If you have multiple individuals linked to an organization Contact, each of them will need to be separate rows in this file AND you will need to record their connection to the organization in the RELATIONS tab

Contact IDs

Contact IDs in Sumac are numbers that uniquely identify an individual or organization. All other records in Sumac are linked to a CONTACT with the Contact ID. If your existing software uses a unique identifier for an individual or organization, you can enter that into the Contact ID field in this sheet.

If you don’t have unique ID numbers for your CONTACTS (Column A), and you do not have any other data you are sending for the migration (Donations, Memberships, etc.), you may leave this column blank.

If you will be adding data to the other sheets like Donations, Communications, Memberships, etc, you will need an ID so you can link this other information to the correct individual or organization. You can create a unique identifier for each of the CONTACTS you have entered in this tab if you do not have one.

Mandatory Fields

These are fields that need to have information for the row to be successfully imported into Sumac.

Mandatory Field(s)
Default Value Imported (If no data present)
Last Name / Organization Name
[unknown]

If there is no data in the fields listed above, the corresponding default values will be imported.
For example, if there is no Last Name or Organization name, the imported CONTACT will have Last Name of “[unknown]”.

 

Example

Note how organization CONTACTS are entered.


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