NPSP Data Import Stories

The NPSP Data Import Tool is a relatively new thing. I believe it was provided to give assistance to organizations who were switching to NPSP from legacy systems. Creating all the records in the proper order and with the proper linkage between contacts, households, org accounts, affiliations, donations, payments and so on can be daunting. And NPSP Data Import Tool makes that easy. It’s the tool of choice or migrating data into NPSP!

However, as I tried to help others use the tool, I realized that there is more to the story than simply importing data. Let me explain.

Quick Overview of NPSP Data Import Tool

Each line in your spreadsheet will be imported into a record called a NPSP Data Import record and will then be analyzed by the NPSP Data Import Tool and mapped onto one or more related records, some new and some matched from existing records. This is a complex but powerful idea.

The NPSP Data Import record is a flat representation of a bunch of information. But once it is processed, you can follow links to individual two contacts, one household, one organization, one affiliation, one campaign, one donation, and one payment. And you can tell if the processing succeeded, created new records, matched old records, or failed. If it failed, you can edit the flat data right inside Salesforce and try again.

Stores are at the heart of

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