When your gifts are not linked to your donors
Why Relae asks you to add a donor reference to the gift rows, and how to do it.
A gift has to belong to somebody. When a file lists gifts on their own, with no way to tell which donor each one belongs to, there is nothing Relae can honestly do with them: attaching money to a guessed donor is the one mistake that is worse than importing nothing.
What Relae asks for
It asks you to put the donor's id on each gift row, and it tells you which of your own columns to use, because it has already looked. If your donor tab has a Contact ID, the gift rows need that same Contact ID. A name is not enough: names collide, and two Margaret Chens become one donor with double the giving.
Doing it in your spreadsheet
- 1Open the gifts tab and add a column next to the gift rows.
- 2Fill it with the donor id from the donor tab. A lookup formula does this in one go if the two tabs share a name or an email.
- 3Save, and import again. Relae will pick the column up on its own.
If some gifts already have it
Relae tells you how many rows are covered before you start, so you can see whether it is a handful to fix by hand or a formula worth writing. Gifts that do carry a reference come in normally; only the ones without are held back, and they are held back visibly rather than dropped.