Transition from groups to custom fields

I’m about to do this for our organization as well. The best solution I’ve found, so far, is some combination of a filtered search, download, tweak the csv file, upload. I’ll let you know how that goes. 

It would be nice if NfG allowed for bulk editing custom fields as one of the Bulk Actions.

Hi ​@Kaylen Herndon and ​@Eileen Chalupa ! The easiest way to do this en masse is through a self-import. 

1. First go to Contacts, select all, and choose Bulk Actions > Export
2. Export at least the contact’s name and their Id--this is the internal ID, and it’s the only place it lives! Very useful for doing bulk updates to existing contacts
3. In your exported spreadsheet, add one column for every custom field you want to import. A custom field called Alumni Year would be “Custom Field Alumni Year” in my spreadsheet
4. It’ll be much easier to populate the answers to these questions rather than editing individual contacts over and over and over again.
5. Be sure to set up the custom field(s) in the Settings tab before importing. If there are multiple potential answers, I recommend using the Select option and defining all your possible answers. This helps to standardize naming conventions and ensure it’s effective when pulling data into Filters.
6. Once you’ve finished, go to Settings > Imports, and follow the prompts to do a self-import. With the Id field in your spreadsheet, that acts as the unique identifier to update existing contacts and not create any duplicates

Hope this helps! Please don’t hesitate to come to a weekly office hours session if you want more hands-on assistance: https://community.bonterratech.com/events?tab=upcoming&type=Network%20for%20Good%20Office%20Hours%20

Yes!! We are in the same boat. I created a custom field called “engagement activities” to track all the ways our donors are connected to us, i.e. gala attendence, receiving annual report and stewardship pieces in the mail,etc. I created all the fields, went through the process of downloading the data out of the groups section, and ultimately abandoned the project because NFG puts all the information in in one masterfile. There isn’t a way for me to update a new activity without also having to re-upload all the old activity. Plus the export came out with semicolons as the parsing symbol, but required the data to be uploaded again with the comma as the parsing symbol. It was too clunky and I wasn’t able to keep it up, I am the only person attempting to work on our database and direct all of the fundraising efforts for our home, we just don’t have the bandwidth for this. 

​@Jenny Floria thanks for sharing this! I’d never considered that when you do an import for custom fields and checkboxes are involved, you would need to include the previous info rather than just add new info… that’s challenging!

If this is something that would be updated regularly, then it would make sense to break it down into different custom fields (like a Yes radio button for receives annual report) or have them as Groups. I could see it making sense keeping them as Groups. If that makes the Groups section overwhelming, maybe try different naming conventions… like a category then the group name. So I might have like:

Communication: Annual Report
Communication: Newsletter
Activity: Gala
Activity: P2P

That’ll give you an easier view than just a huge list of groups only separated by their name.