As of July 12, 2021, this "Learn Veracross" site has been deprecated. It will remain live through December 2022, but will no longer be updated. All knowledge content has moved to the new Veracross Community. Please update your bookmarks.
Overview
The Contact Information upload allows schools to update certain demographic information (outlined below) for constituents who already exist in the database.
Note: This template cannot be used to import new constituents into the database; it is only used to update information for people already in the database.
Uploading contact information involves the following two steps:
1. Preparing the data for upload using the Contact Information template, which is provided before data import on the Importer site.
2. Uploading the data using the Veracross Data Importer
Preparing the Data for Upload
Prepare a comma separated value (CSV) file containing contact data for any/all of the fields listed below. This file must contain all of the required columns in the order listed below, even if no content is populated in the columns. If a cell, or even a whole column is left blank in the import file for any of the fields, the import process will leave whatever data exists for that field. For example, if person ID 1234 has a Mobile Phone number in Veracross already, and if the import file CSV is created with a row for person ID 1234 where a new email_1 value is provided, but mobile phone is left blank in the import file, the import will not touch the existing data for mobile phone for this person. This way, this import type can be used to simply “update” the values that are provided in the file, and leave untouched any values currently in the database.
Note that each row of the CSV file will contain the contact information for only one individual (identified in the person_fk column).
Fields on the Import Type Template
Contact Information
The required fields are marked with an asterisk (*).
| person_fk* | Numeric. This is the Veracross ID assigned in the database for this individual. It is crucial for mapping the contact information to the correct person record. |
| email_1 | This is the email address that corresponds to the Email 1 field on the person record. This field is utilized when sending emails via distribution lists. If the value in this field is not a valid email address, the upload will fail. |
| email_2 | This is the email address that corresponds to the Email 2 field on the person record. This field is used for reference purposes only. Distribution lists never send email to addresses in the Email 2 field. If the value in this field is not a valid email address, the upload will fail. |
| phone_home | This is the home phone number for this constituent. This number does not need to be in a specific format, but formatting for international numbers will be imported as entered. |
| phone_mobile | This is the mobile phone number for this constituent. This number does not need to be in a specific format, but formatting for international numbers will be imported as entered. |
| phone_business | This is the business phone number for this constituent. This number does not need to be in a specific format, but formatting for international numbers will be imported as entered. |
Uploading the Data
After the CSV file has been created, click the ‘Choose File’ button and select the appropriate CSV file.
Before clicking the ‘Import’ button to begin the import process, the user may click the ‘show’ link next to the Advanced Options heading. Here, the user can specify how the system should handle any duplicate rows that may exist within the CSV:
- Allow duplicates to be inserted: the importer will insert the records exactly as they are found in the CSV. Duplicate records will be inserted into the database. This option is actually meaningless for this import type, but the next two options potentially have meaning for this import type:
- Automatically eliminate duplicates: the importer will automatically eliminate one of the duplicated rows before importing the records into the database.
- Fail on duplicates: if duplicate rows are found, the import will fail and no records will be imported into the database.
Data Integrity Checks
The importer will check to ensure that each Person ID maps to a person record in the database and will ensure that email addresses are in a valid format. If data integrity issues exist for either of these checks, an error will be thrown and the upload will fail.