Updating Member Addresses in Bulk using the NCOA Spreadsheet
After every mailing, our mailer should send us a spreadsheet listing every member who has changed address since the previous mailing—commonly known as NCOA. Additionally, you should receive a spreadsheet listing the members whom a forwarding address could not be found. Copy and paste the information from each of these spreadsheets into our NCOA Google Sheet. Contact our mailer if they do not send this to you.
You will only have to update the records in DonorPerfect for those in the NCOA spreadsheet and not the NFA spreadsheet.
Uploading the NCOA spreadsheet into DonorPerfect
Download the spreadsheet onto your computer. If the spreadsheet has the new address split into individual columns for Address, City, State, & Zip, then you can do this on using OpenOffice. Otherwise, if the new address is all in one cell, then you will have to use a computer with Windows Excell.- Delete all irrelevant columns. Make sure to DELETE the old address columns unless the spreadsheet does not include the Donor ID (it should).
- If address, city, state, zip or any combination of these are in one cell, use Excel to separate into individual columns.
- Select the column with the combined fields
- Make sure there are enough open columns to the right of the selected column as it will not create new cells for the split fields but simply paste over anything already there.
- Select the "Data" tab
- In the "Data Tools" section, click "Text to Columns."
- Make sure "Delimited" is selected and click "Next"
- Under "Delimiters" select "Comma" and click "Finish"
- Because the state and zip codes are likely separated by a space, these cells will likely still be together.
- Follow the same steps with the state/zip column but instead of "Comma" as the delimiter, choose "Space"
- These are the only columns you will need (change the column names to how they appear below):
- donor_id
- address
- address2 if available
- city
- state
- zip
- Save the file as "Insert_Update_Names_Addresses" as a .csv file
- In DonorPerfect, under "Utilities" click "Import"
- Upload the file and make sure that "Update Existing Records then Insert the rest as new" is selected
- For "My import file includes:" select "Main Records Only" and click "Next Step"
- You should see a message that reads "All fields in your import file match," if not, fix any errors.
- Click "Next Step"
- A Warning window will pop up, Click "Yes, Please Continue"
- You should then see a table matching the import data to the data in DonorPerfect. If you see no errors, click "Final Step: Import Records"
