Hi everyone! My organization is new to Funraise and we’re so excited to get started. We are still on the historic data migration step and, as a smaller nonprofit, we don’t have a dedicated IT person who will be pulling out our old data to add it to the Funraise migration template. It’s up to me to prep our data and I’m fairly tech savvy, so I’m sure I can do it, but I wanted to reach out to the community to ask if anyone else has migrated from Blackbaud’s eTapestry? If so, would you be willing to share the structure of your queries and reports that you pulled from eTapestry for the migration? Or even share an outline of steps you took to prepare your data and get it ready for Funraise?
(Mods, please delete if not allowed! Just hoping for a little guidance on this from my peers if possible )
Hi @CMAT — If there are any insights or an outline of thoughts that come from your conversation, please share them with the community. It’s a big topic, so certainly hard to boil down in a quick response, but your expertise is appreciated!
E-Tap’s export process is to send you text (46) files that are inter-dependent on unique ID to “fields” and not records. I was expecting a variation of a csv output that I could manipulate but instead got rocked with these files. You will need an expert to “rebuild” BUT I skirted the process prior to the cutoff date from E-Tap by exporting journal entries and constituents/accounts by year to a spreadsheet and confirmed the “total” annual amounts with the text file export from E-Tap. Funraise also has a sandbox to import/map fields into and has an intensive process to qualify the import but its a good place to confirm financials etc.
Funraise uses the email address as the primary key so if you have a record with multiple emails tied to giving from one donor, you need to manage that under one email address.
Process is lengthy and requires time management and planning. Chunking the export by year helps accountability on accuracy before moving to the next year.
Also a good opportunity to “clean” data and filter what is necessary into Funraise and what needs to be separated but accessible to reference.
Keep an eye on the Payment Processing with Blackbaud as recurring or monthly donations will need a line in the sand so you need to manage communication to donors transferring the new payment process via Funraise. be careful here as donations after the cutoff could end in a black hole.
Outline:
Confirm the necessary fields that map into Funraise from E-Tap
Create queries that export data from fields YOU are not bringing over with the record ID so you can reference against record ID in funraise
Give yourself plenty of time between the export from E-Tap and the cutoff date. You will need access to E-Tap while importing into Funraise.
E-Tap’s team need a little over 24 hours (depending on # of records) to provide you with their export.
Play in the sandbox as long as you can before importing into Funraise. However once you start the import, Funraise’s team is EXCELLENT working with you on quality of data importing.
There is a lot more so reach out if necessary… hope this helps
Hello all! I find myself in a similar situation as quinn, above - my org is also trying to migrate from eTapestry to Funraise and I’m getting overwhelmed with all the data and how to move it. I’ve watched the Funraise video on migration and I think I understand the basics, but like quinn, we don’t have an IT person and I’ve been trying to prep the data myself, to my frustration.
CMAT - You mentioned that you migrated a client a couple of years ago in March 2021 - may I contact you to discuss a similar service? I’m hoping you see this and can help us as my efforts are slower than we’d like; I suspect you may be more of an expert.
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