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Donations import

The donations importer is denormalized: a single row can contain the supporter, the donation, and the payment together. It is useful both for small organizations that keep everything on a spreadsheet and for structured ones that reconcile through an external reference.

Before reading this page, see the general rules in CSV Imports (file format, dates, amounts, booleans, tags, deduplication).

Supporter columns

They are the same as in the supporters import, with two renames to distinguish them from the donation fields:

  • tagssupporter tags
  • notesupporter note

All the other supporter columns have the same name: supporter external ref, donor type, first name, last name, company, date of birth, place of birth, title, job, phone, mobile, email, tax identification number, vat, address, city, province, zip, country code, accepts email marketing, accepts sms marketing, accepts phone marketing, accepts postal marketing, accepts profilation marketing.

Campaign, donation, and payment columns

ColumnRequiredDescription
campaign nameyes (or a fallback campaign)Campaign name. Matched by title (case-insensitive). If it does not exist, it is created.
donation external refnoExternal reference of the donation. Rows with the same value merge into a single donation.
payment methodyesLabel of the manual payment method. If it does not exist, it is created.
amountyesPayment amount, format x.xx (e.g. 10.00).
payment dateyesPayment date, ISO 8601.
donation tagsnoDonation tags (cell in quotes if it contains multiple values).

You can include custom_<key> columns for custom fields of both type supporter and type donation: each value is assigned to the entity of its own definition (see Custom fields).

Fallback campaign

In the import dialog you can specify a fallback campaign: it is used for rows with an empty campaign name. If a row has neither campaign name nor a fallback, the row is discarded.

Grouping payments into a donation

To group multiple payments under a single donation (e.g. a recurring contribution with one payment per month), set the same donation external ref on all the rows of that donation. Without donation external ref, each row becomes a separate one-off donation.

The donation is created from the first row (in file order) with that reference: the donation's amount and date come from the first payment.

note

Only manual payments can be imported. Automatic methods (Stripe, PayPal, etc.) cannot be imported from CSV. The grouping donation is always created as one-off, even if the payments represent a recurring one: in the model this does not affect the collected total.

Payment methods

The method specified in payment method is looked up by label (case-insensitive) among the organization's manual methods. If it does not exist, a manual method with that label is created automatically.