What is the Gift and Contact Import Tool?

At Virtuous, we know that the daily task of entering gifts or lists of new contacts at your organization can feel a bit tedious or time-consuming. For this reason, we’ve built the Gift and Contact Import Tool with a number of features and safeguards designed to make gift entry as efficient and accurate as possible!

To navigate there, find Import Tool near the bottom of the left-hand Primary Navigation menu.

From here, you'll be able to see your Import History including status. Data with Imported status will have a green cloud icon for you to view the information in that file. Data with Processed status will allow you to Archive, Delete, or edit the gift information within, including entering new gifts in that Import. 

*Note: For organizations with Virtuous Giving, new imports will be created daily and appear in your Import History. These imports will have the status Processed until your team reviews the gift transactions and imports the data. 

Gift Imports

Giving data may come from any number of places. Some organizations use Virtuous Giving to process credit cards or another integrated processor. Others may have different giving platforms, which allow them to export data in spreadsheet format and then import gifts in bulk. Cash, checks, and even stocks or gifts-in-kind may require manual data entry. All of these different sources will flow through the Gift and Contact Import tool. 

Gift data is added to the Gift and Contact Import tool using manual entry or importing a CSV file with gift data exported from another source. For CSV file imports, Virtuous will look at all of the data provided with each transaction and attempt to match each Gift with the correct Contact record. These transactions are then sorted into three different categories: Match Needed, Update Needed, or Ready for Import, which you’ll see listed at the bottom of the screen once you’ve begun your new Import. 

Imports coming from Virtuous Giving or Raise Donors will have a batch code with the name of the platform and the date. These gifts will also have a transaction source of the platform name as a way to easily identify the gifts that come in from either of these platforms. You can use both the batch code or transaction source to find these gifts in a gift query.

You will be given optional Gift Import Details to include below the import fields. 

Contacts

Similarly, multiple contacts can be bulk-imported through the Gift and Contact Import Tool. Just select Import Type as Contact Import and choose the CSV file to upload. With Contact Imports, you’re able to add this list of contacts to an event!

Templates

Virtuous has created Gift and Contact CSV Templates if your data is not already in a file or to ensure that your spreadsheet has the same headers. Virtuous will attempt to reconcile and clean up contacts/gifts after you upload your file. Once your CSV has been processed you’ll be given the opportunity to update any problem data before the final import.

For more information on the Gift and Contact Import Tool, you can check our Gift Processing course in the Virtuous Academy. 

Now that you have an understanding of the Gift and Contact Import Tool, you'll be able to start your gift entry process!