Name: Ask The Expert about Cleanup Tips
Uploaded: 2025-04-22T18:31:50.629Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 20 s
Description: Ask The Expert about Cleanup Tips

Transcript for "Ask The Expert about Cleanup Tips": Hello, everybody. Welcome to our, session here today. This is, of course, our Ask the Expert session. This is following up from last Wednesday's, session about some cleanup tips and some things that, that, that we have available to you in the system that you can do yourself. The yes. And I do see hello, everybody from, that's, that that is chiming in on the chat here. Of course, most of you already know who I am because I recognize so many names that are coming in here. I am Geoff Arbuckle. I like to call myself the eTapestry guy. I think a lot of other people around here in Blackbaud does do too. But, yeah, we'll be diving in here into my test database here and a couple of things here that I do want to, talk about before, I start really kinda digging into some of the questions. But, one question I did see that came up here that I do see that Jeanette has also, responded to. Allison asked, how do I mass delete accounts? In eTapestry, there actually isn't a mass delete function as it, as it is right now. However, Jeanette does have a very good recommendation here. You definitely make sure that as you are deleting any any accounts, especially if you have, like, a group of accounts that you want to delete, whether they have just been identified as folks who are just no longer, you know, donating or or something like that. It's always a good idea to back those up into a report so that you still have physical files of those. However, there we do have a service that we can charge for that that will do some mass deletions. But as it stands right now, the the deletions are usually one account at a time. I would still say it might be a good idea to first identify what the accounts are that you do want to delete, whether they haven't donated in the last several years or they don't have any donations or something to that effect, and then kind of work from that point. But Jeanette does have a good, recommendation to say that, you know, definitely talk to support about, perhaps backing up, accounts or backing up your database, certainly before doing any kind of mass deletes. Definitely recommend that as well. Alright. So, yeah, we are getting some pretty good, interactions here in the, in the chat. So, yes, glad to see people are joining in to hear a little bit more about, some cleanup tips. Now the first few things I do wanna talk about here as I get into, my test database here, which you should be able to see now here on screen, but, these a couple of things I wanted to talk about here first before I start looking up, some of the questions that might be coming in. I did wanna talk a little bit about some of the things that kind of were asked about or brought up in the session last Wednesday. Oh, and Lexi here has a great, yes. Thank you, Lexi, for that. In the spirit of cleaning up our database, I've been using this knowledge base article today. That's a that's a good one. I think I know which one, that you are referencing there. Definitely take a look at that, everybody, or at least, you know, get that link and copy and paste it into your browser, to take a look at later. Thank you, Lexi, for, sending that through. That's much appreciated. Now one of the things that I did, see in the questions last week was when I was talking about disabling, user defined fields. So I did kind of wanna show that to you just to kind of see if how these fields interact once you disable a field and what does that mean for any account that has that field marked in their database. Okay? So let's say let's go to my account here. I am account number 61. And when I get in here, I look at my defined fields, and I realize that maybe, maybe I no longer really need to keep track of this favorite color. Favorite color, if you've ever been to past webinars of mine, whenever I've talked about creating a user defined field or, talking about collecting information in user defined field, Favorite color is always my, my go to example on that because there are several different ways that you could potentially record that type of information. But here, I have a drop down menu saying the blue is my favorite color. Maybe I decide, you know, I I no longer need to know that information for folks. So instead of it being a field that every time I go in and create a new account, I have to see favorite color always listed, and all of that good stuff. To to disable the field, if I went to management and I go into user defined fields and I I know that favorite color is in my base category, so I go into base and I come down here to favorite color where is it at? There it is. Okay, so I come down here to favorite color and I click on enabled. Now when I click enable, that, disables that field, and I'm gonna save and view all categories just to make sure that that is now it says there's only 19 items under base, so now I know that that field has been disabled. Now if I go to my account, and this kind of ties back to that question that I wanted to kind of illustrate here a little bit more, because somebody asked us, like, well, will that information still remain in accounts after you've disabled the field? And the answer is yes. So when I go back to my account, you'll see that when I go into the find fields, it still says that my favorite color is blue. Now I can change this so that it no longer shows this information by opening up the drop down menu. But whereas before I had red, yellow, blue, green, purple all those different options, my only option now because this is a disabled field is to set it to none selected. And when I save it, what will happen is is that this field will no longer appear. Even when I expand the base category, it won't show up there. So it still will remember the information that was filled in there, which also means that, if you have the, you can query on it still. You can still report on that information. You can still get the information from the disabled items. It just won't show up any longer. So, like, now if I were to go to create a new account as opposed to looking at somebody who had something already filled in, Here are all my base categories for my user defined fields constituent, but you will see now that I don't have the option here for favorite color anymore. So disabling it will take it away from anybody who doesn't have that marked or any new accounts that you add. It will save the information for those people who did have something filled in there, but you could go in there at some point and say, okay. Well, I want to remove that from this account that I'm looking at, save it. The only other option that you will have other than what's been selected is the none selected option so that it will, allow for you to be able to, make that change, save it so that that field disappears on those accounts with that existing information on it. So that information will remember it, or the database will remember that information and allow for that information to be utilized in reports and so forth. And the same thing goes if instead of deleting or I'm sorry, disabling the entire user defined field, If I went in here and I say, okay. Well, show my disabled items so that I can oop. There we go. So that I can then re enable it, and I save and view all categories. Now if I were to go in here and say, okay. Now I want to just disable some of these colors. Maybe, nobody ever picks orange or purple. I don't know why they're perfectly fine colors, but you can disable those. But anybody who did have those, those would still show up in those reports and still would be something in a query where you can say show the disabled items, and it will still show those options available to you. JoLynn has a has a good question here. Are the UDFs found in persona, transactions, and defined fields different? Example, like membership level. They are only different in how they are utilized and how they will be recorded. Though so, like, let's say you have a and this is one of the main reasons why whenever we, like, have, when we talk about, like, creating user defined fields, there are usually when you get into field applications so let's see here. Test field. Let's fill out this first field. When you get into field application, one of the things that will be stated here is we recommend that you really only oh, it's right here. It's this asterisk at the bottom. We only recommend that you apply fields to one area because let's say you have, that membership level. Right? And let's say you have it on all three of those pages, persona, transactions, and defined fields. Right? If you fill if you select the membership level on defined fields, it doesn't read it any place else. It will only be marked on the defined fields page. So that's where the difference is whenever you find UDFs that are marked on multiple pages. That's why we recommend that of like, when I say a vast majority of your defined fields, I'm talking, like, 99% of your defined fields should only have one of these field applications, selected for that field. Because one of the biggest troubles that ends up happening and what sometimes gets the database into a pretty messy state is you say, okay, well, I wanna find membership level on the defined fields page, I want it to be marked on the transaction, and I want it to be marked in personas. Right? Well, if you mark it on personas, it's not gonna be marked on the transaction, it's not gonna be marked on the defined fields page. It's fine if you say there's a field or for whatever reason there may be a very specific field that you may want to have marked in every instance on every single page that it's applied to. You can certainly do that. However, the problem is is that you run into inconsistency problems. Some people mark it on personas and they don't mark it anyplace else. Sometimes they mark it on the defined fields page and they don't mark it someplace else. So the reason why you want to make sure that you are keeping those defined fields just apply to one page at a time is because those other pages don't communicate with each other, and it keeps things consistent. If you say, okay, I want account type where I label somebody as an individual, as a, business, or as whatever, an organization, a school, a church, or what have you. I only want that to appear on the constituent's level. That way, it's the only place that can be marked that makes it easier to be found for queries, for reports, and everybody then is kind of basically funneled into, the the correct place to mark that. And, Bryn asks, if you just want it, on the define fields page, what do you choose? Constituents. The the account types when it says constituents, tributes, and users, that is the define fields page for those types of accounts. K? Now let's say you have fields that have been marked on constituents, they're marked on, personas as well. Right? And now you say, okay. Well, I wanna clean that up so that anybody who has this field marked on personas will then get it moved to constituents and then, you know, and then make sure that we can get it removed from personas? Well, that's where we get into the mass update idea. Right? So when you go into management and you click on mass update yes. I do wanna leave. I'm not gonna save that. So we can sit here and we can say, okay. Well, do we want to ups update existing accounts? And let's say we have built a query that says, here are all of the, people who have account type of individual marked on or they're marked in their personas, but now we want to mark them on their accounts on the defined fields page as opposed to the persona page. You would come in here to this, mass update and update existing accounts, which is the very first option on the left hand side. And you can come in here and you can say, okay. While we have our query, let's just pretend that my, custom account query that only has my name is the only one marked here or is the only one that we need to make, or wait a minute. I'm confusing myself there. Let's say that this query that is just really only me with, in a custom account query. Let's pretend like it's got a hundred people in it that has a field that needs to be marked on the define fields page. So I select that query, I say I want to assign because that's going to assign the selected values for all the results in the query, and I say now I want to mark this account or these accounts as individual. Okay? So when you do that, it is saying okay everybody in this query will be assigned this marking on their account. Now on the next page, it will say accounts to update and it's in big bold red letters one. You can view that to make sure that okay, yes, these are the accounts that I want to update. And there is this warning here that says we strongly suggest you run this process when other users are not accessing eTapestry. The main reason why is that this is what we used to call an intensive process, and what would happen is as a mass update is running, queries and reports are not available to people to run. Now most of the time mass updates are done very quickly, but in the event that maybe, you know, somebody is pulling a bunch of reports right now, or they're working in a bunch of journals or whatever, you might wanna hold off on doing a mass update just in case that, you know, just in case that it it takes a little bit to complete. But once you say, okay, yes, I you know, this all looks right. These, you know, these are the right people. You can even view the report of those people. When you click next, it will run that and commit that mass update. So the process would then say, okay. Well, here's the query of all these people who may have been marked as individual in their persona. I want this to be stored on their user defined fields page of their account. I'm gonna mass update that to show that. And then what you will do after that is now you can mass remove that field, or those markings on the user defined fields, that has been assigned to the persona. Exact same process. You go to the mass update, you then say update existing personas. We'll use our very same query. We will now say, okay, well, what are the personas to update? Well, it's likely only selected to the primary persona. And then in this case, we say remove, and we come down here and we select our defined field, We go through the preview process, all of that. These other persona values are available to you. The only problem here though is you want to be very, very careful about this because like say under, let's say email. Let's say you fill in an email address here and you say, okay, assign. What that's gonna do is it's gonna look at everybody in this query. It's going to assign whatever that email, whatever that email address is. So you do need to be a little bit careful when you're dealing with that just to be safe. Don't wanna mess too much with these persona values in general. Okay? Just you if anything, what you might wanna do is you might say, okay, well, we can assign something to email like do not email or something like that. And you can say, okay. Assign that to all of these accounts. And then later go back and say, okay. Now remove it, and it will wipe out their email address. But, I would be careful about what you fill into these fields because it will assign that value to all of those fields in all of the accounts, I should say, that's in that query. When we are dealing with the creating new items, like creating, new contacts or mass interactions, this is you know, it's still basically the same three step process. You select the type of entry you wanna select or that you want to add. You select your query, and it will then say you fill out these fields, and then it will just add that contact entry into your, into those accounts in that query. K? Looking over Lexi's question here, not about cleanup. That's okay. No no worries there. When downloading PDFs from eTapestry, they are locked and uneditable. I read on knowledge base that this is to protect sensitive information such as with tax receipts. The PDF, I was working with yesterday, though, was mailing labels. The knowledge base solution was to open the PDF in Word, but that that moved all of the margins, which ruins the entire format for printing. I figured out a workaround, but I'm wondering if you have another workaround that you know of. Not really. Mostly because when it comes to, like, working with the mailing labels, I would still probably say you would be downloading PDFs typically. You should also be able in the step by step process to, download the file into Word as opposed to PDF, which would automatically just take that same formatting and dump it into Word as opposed to a PDF. So you might try that next time, to actually just download the the, the the mailing label template as a Word, file instead. Yep. And that's what Jolin is is also recommending there. So, yeah, Michelle has a oh, you don't have Word. So without having Word, yeah, that's gonna complicate some things there, because what you would at that point, you would have to have a a file type. Yeah. When you put it into Google Docs, it's not happy. Yeah. Google Docs uses a different language than Word does. Yeah. For that, I would really wouldn't have any other workaround because you would have to have a, you you would have to have a program that makes it so that you are, you'd have to have a program that would take that PDF and open it up and allow for you to act for that in there. Print, save the PDF, and then I can edit it. Yeah. That's yeah. I would keep with that work around, Lexi. Alright. Yeah. Michelle, asked her, I'm confused by the constituent versus persona assignment. I have constituent checked, but the UDF is showing on the persona page. So a couple of things about that, Michelle. So make sure that when you go into management user defined fields, you go into the category and you click on the define field itself. When you go to field application, make sure okay. So if this is if this is set up to where it's only showing constituents here, then what I would check here is, let me go back to my account. If it is still showing up under base, so, like, let's say that that, the the field there that I had was the attributes. Right? So, like, let's say, okay, I go into define fields and I see, okay, I'm volunteer and staff here, but then I go into personas, and you also have a set as required. That's okay. That's okay to have it set to required. One thing that probably if it's still showing, like, let's say it's here and it says, okay. I'll show you what I'm let me just do a quick adjustment there on those attributes there. Let me say I have it selected as both. So let's say when I originally set this up, I had it set to both. Let's say go back in time a little bit here, and we have it set up as both. We're gonna leave those alone. So let's say now I have okay. Well, in my define fields page for my account, I have volunteer and staff set up as attributes. But if I go to personas, I see, oh, I have volunteer and staff. Let's say I decide I no longer want that to be in both of those places. Right? I've I've marked them on both of these pages for a long time. I am essentially double entering the attribute information. I only want it to appear going forward on the define fields page. So you at some point along the way, whether it was you or another user, you went into define fields, you found the attributes field, and you say, oh, okay. Yep. It's applied to both personas and constituents. I came here and I said, now I only want it to be applied here. I uncheck personas. I click save and finish. It says, you know, make sure that you understand what you're doing. This is just a warning to make sure you you get that. Yes. It's going to remove it from the personas. I click okay. I click save and finish. When I come back to my account and I go back to personas, it's still listed here and that's the same thing as disabling a field. It is keeping this information so that you are aware that it was still in the personas at one point in time. But if you were to uncheck these, it won't show up anymore. So that may be why you have it showing in both of those pages is that it was removed from the, personas page as a field that would show up there, but there were people that still had it marked there. So you may just need to remove that information, and then it will disappear as if that was never on that page to begin with. And a a telltale sign of that would be, like, when you saw when I clicked on the field to uncheck that, the only options that were available for me were those two fields that were checked. Whereas if you go into the define fields page and you click on attributes, you see that I also have former staff and member as well. So that's a pretty good telltale sign. If you see something that was either disabled or taken off of a page, and you say, okay. Well, I'm still seeing it listed there. I'm still seeing something there when I shouldn't see it on that page. That telltale sign is usually going to be that the only options are to uncheck or to re you know, have something like none select in a drop down menu. So, alright, let me double check to make sure. Yeah. I think I am caught up on the questions so far. So one of the other things I also oh, wait. Jolene has asked, is there a way to use mass update to remove content in a UDF? Example, I need to remove one membership level. Absolutely. So, so let's say this is a situation where you say, okay. Membership level, I wanna remove I don't want anybody to be marked as gold anymore for whatever reason. And what that what I would do is I would query on everybody who has gold marked as a, defined field, and that's where we can go in and say, okay. Go to management, go to mass update, update existing accounts if that's accounts would be where that defined field or would be on the defined fields page of the account. And you would select your query. You would say remove, and you'd come down here to membership level and say remove gold. So yes. So, basically, query on everybody who has the field that you want to remove. And, conceivably, you could do this with base all constituents. Most of the people who, you know, like, maybe there's only a few people that have gold on the membership level, but I could say, you know, do the, do the base all constituents and just make sure that I am removing that from everyone. One thing that I would be careful about doing, if you query on everybody who has the membership level that you want to remove, If you are wanting to assign a different membership level to them or something in another field, do that first. So first, say, okay. Well, I want to assign, that they are no longer going to have this membership or I'm going to assign instead of having membership level, maybe I have a new field for this. Maybe it's just going to be called that, you know, they're just a member now or something like that. Assign that first and then come back, do the remove, and remove the field that you don't want them to have anymore. So it is something that you would have to, kind of think through for are you swapping the that membership level to a different, field or to a different designation? Do that first and then remove the selection under the field that you no longer want them to appear under. So that would be something I would definitely probably wanna think through that before you go in and do the mass update. But to remove, it would just be, okay. Here's my query. I wanna do remove, and I wanna remove membership level. When you go to the next page, it will say, okay. There's a 48 people to update. This is what's going to be removed from those accounts, and then you click next. Bella asked, is it necessary to add the membership level? How so on, what do you mean by, adding the membership? Is it is it just a field that we would recommend, or are you asking if you would have to add the membership level before doing the removal? And, Monique, about your question about DIY forms, do they have logic capabilities? I assume you're me you're saying, like, a conditional thing where if somebody checks something on a different field or some sort of field gets activated. Yeah. So with something like that, unfortunately, no. The DIY forms are relatively simplistic on that. So with that, the, so with the the or with the DIY forms, whatever the DIY form is set up to do is the only thing it can do. Like, for example, you can't have a contact form with an optional section to make a donation. It's only a contact form. It also means that the fields that you apply there just will appear for everyone. And Brenda's right. You can add a hidden field and have it automatically added to the account. So, like, for example, if everybody who's gonna come to your page is supposed to, have a certain defined field selected, you can do that with the hidden fields, but there wouldn't be a way on the page itself to say, if I select this, then these sets of options to select appear. And if I choose something else, a different set will appear underneath that. That's the only difference there. And yeah. Bella, I mean, it's not, Yeah. The, so with, and Bella with that yeah. So, like, with the, membership level, if it is something that you do want to swap out, then you would want to make sure, that you are adding the or you are doing the, assign first and then do the remove from the membership or from the old membership level field. As far as, like, having a membership level field, you don't necessarily have to have one like that. So I just have that field for various examples that I've that I've done in the past. Oh, a multiple choice option for what? A UDF or gifts, gift info like fun. So yeah. So the so what I was saying was, like, you know, basically saying, like, okay. Well, if if you're if you're creating a form that says, okay. Well, if I select this option, it's going to have these different, these different options. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. Oh, sorry, Judah. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. I'm just looking at, Lexi's question there about the multiple choice. So, yeah, so choosing a gift for the student, they sponsor a personal gift, cake, school supplies. Lexi, I would one thing I would check there on that is if this is a gift like, if this is a donation form where they're saying, okay. Well, this gift is for the student and it's going to be a personal gift or it's gonna be a cake or it's gonna be school supplies. One thing that I would check on that, and this is one thing to, that can sometimes be hidden from folks. If it was assigned to their gift, so, like, the gift has that user defined field, it might be listed under on the gift itself under user defined fields. Now you'll see here there's a little asterisk indicating that this gift has a user defined field selected, but it does not automatically open that. And when I open that, I can see here, oh, okay. Well, they have ticket quantity. So I would check to see if the information is there because if it's a user defined field on the form, it's collecting that information. If it is a, yeah, it is something that, that I would definitely look at on the on the gift itself because that could be something else. If it's a if it's applied to the defined fields, like, let's say I had the attributes. Yeah. Like, so I would if it's something like this where it's on the defined fields page because, see, this is something else you also have to be careful of when you're talking about, like, the data health, from a different perspective. Because if I were to say, okay, I want the attributes to be on my form and depending on what they select on the donation form in the attributes field, I want it to be filled in. Well, if this is already filled in with volunteer and staff, this could be a scenario where it's not changing the information because something's already filled in there. If that's the scenario, especially when it comes to drop down menus, use the, DIY form will not change information in the database. It will only record the information in the note that shows that this is what they filled out and here's the the, the note indicating that there was a duplicate account. That could be something where that field where you want them to say this gift is specifically for this transaction for this student, that should be a user defined field. Okay. So I yeah. I think, Lexi, there's, I think, a little bit confused about that. I'll have to I'll look at the form that you sent over. Well, let's let's see if we can oh, so are you saying that it's this information here that's not being recorded? So based on the amount that they give, it would indicate what the Oh, okay. Wait a minute. Right here. Please indicate which gift you're donating in the comment box below. See, that should be recording in the user defined field, or that should, that this these additional comments should be collected in the journal entry in the note field. And if it isn't, So there could be a couple of things. If something gets filled in here, like so I want this to be a grocery card. If I fill that in and I click submit, not only will it show up in the in the notification that you receive internally that says this is the donation. Yeah. See, I I have I would definitely go back to support on this because if you had this as a defined field under disclaimer and it had the the multiple choice option Or if people are actually filling in the additional comments yeah. I would double check. So a couple of things there with the, with the multiple choice option there with the bubble field that would have appeared up here instead of the additional comments. One, make sure absolutely make sure that it was a transaction user defined field and not a, account level defined field because that's not if if there was something else selected in a previous gift or a previous transaction, it won't change the, transaction or wouldn't change the accounts information that was filled in. If it's still not coming through, that is a bug, and support needs to to be taken care of that and taking a look at that. There's there there would there would be a solution that would need to be developed and and figured out. So okay. So you're looking with DIY form, if we have only 10 places available, can it be monitored, or can we only set up 10 forms which will be closed after 10 persons sign oh, after 10 people sign up, or do we have to manually you'd have to manually keep an eye on it if you have, if if you have, like, availability issue. The the DIY forms don't have a quantity feature to, to take into consideration there. Yeah. Alexi, I would go back to support and explain that, yeah, that is, that yeah. I I would definitely go back to support. I don't know why they would not say that there's no solution to that because any information that's recorded on the page needs to be put into eTapestry. And if it isn't, then something is not transferring properly. So that is that is most definitely a bug there. Alright. So real quick, one other thing I did wanna touch upon that I did talk about last week was, the import feature. Because one of the things that I wanted to explain and in a couple of different ways is not only can import help you bring in information, it can also help you update, information on accounts as well. Now one of the really cool things about the import is that you'll notice that these are basically saved like templates. Right? So, like, you can set up a new import where you can say, new import for account updates. K? And what this is doing is it's saving this as a template. So as you go through, when you say, okay. Well, I'm going to, choose a file here. So I'm gonna choose this. Let's go to here we go. Account info, and it's going to check to make sure that the file is valid and that it can be used for an import. That's not necessarily saying that it has everything you might need for the import. It's just saying that this file is one, a CSV file, and two, it has, it it has columns, it has information in it, and it's not been imported before. So one of the things that you might find is that you may have a file that is a, one of these, like, single gift by account number or single contact by account number, and you don't have account number in your file or you don't have, all of the required information that might go into a gift, like a, like a fund or, like, you know, whatever, the check date or whatever, It may still say that the the file is valid to import. So it's just basically checking to make sure, one, is it a CSV file, and two, is it a file that has never been imported before. Okay? So once it passes this and it says it's valid, then you can basically move on and say, okay, I want this to be an account information type of import. Once you save this import or once you run the import, it will always remember this was the selection for this template. So each template will already have the type of import, that you are doing for that specific template. One thing that you will be asked about is like, okay, well, do you have different name formats in your import file? Now if you think back to how you create an account, you're always asked, well, what's the name format for this account? Is it an individual? Is it a, family account? Is it a business account? Generally speaking, most files that you will import will have all of the same type of of, name format because it's just easier to deal with that with all of the columns being or all of the rows being consistent under the columns like first name, last name, and account name. But you can mix and match and say, okay. I'm gonna map the type of name format to this specific, import, but most of the time you're probably going to say assign individual to all accounts. This is really important that, the country will determine the address formats for this import. So if you do have let's say you're a you're an organization that's right on the border between two countries, Canada and United States, for example, and you have some donors that live you're you're an American organization, you have some, donors that live just across the border in Canada or vice versa. You have to separate those people in those different countries into two separate files because, this is going to format what fields are to be expected and what the information is based on the country. Because United States and Canada have different formats for postal code just like The United Kingdom has something different than, than The United States or, what have you. So the, down here for the multi select delimiter, this is going to be a scenario where, if you have fields that are checkbox type fields, you can include them into a file so that it will, delineate which box should be checked for that field. Most of the time though, you're not really going to mess too much with that multi select delimiter. But the one step I definitely wanted to show everybody was the mapping step. This is where you see fields like title, you have first name, you have last name. So you would wanna make sure that you say, okay. Well, oop, that's not the right that's not the right one. That was supposed to be first name. So first name, last name. For the account name, you don't have to merge it. You can or you can say, just use the auto generate, data entry rules that are set up in your database. And for sort name, same thing. It will take into consideration what your database already sets those to be. And then, you can also come down here for the address fields. Let's see here. Street, city, And if you have any other fields that you want to import in, like some of the user defined fields, you can do that as well as long as you have them in your file. Now another kind of cool thing is, let's say everybody in your file is, is going to have they're all going to be individual, and you don't have that as a, as a column to map, you can type this in and it will assign that to everyone here. And, yeah. And, basically, what this does is it will look at this and it will then preview this. And if you get this message that says, you have not selected oh, I did, one thing I was supposed to do here. You wanna make sure that you are selecting a key. Now much like with the find fields, only select one box. Like, when it comes to field application, we always say just select one box for user find fields. Same thing for key on imports. What the key is doing is it's saying, okay. Based on, the, based on this field, we will identify duplicates. Okay? The idea here is to make sure that you are finding something that can be identifiable if there are duplicates. And we only recommend that you if you didn't select any, everybody's gonna be, nobody's going to be identified as a duplicate. But if you select more than one field, it may be too difficult to find duplicate. So select whether it's account name or email address, one of those two are going to be your best option for your key. Okay? When you go to the next page, this will say you've not mapped all of the data for your field. That's fine. That's just saying you have some fields here that you did not put any information into. That's quite alright. But here, we'll see that we have okay. Well, we have Donald Duck, is our person here, and, these are the information that he's got filled in on his, on the columns and what I have what I've mapped. And when I get to the person or the possible duplicates, it will say, wait. You already have somebody like this. Does this look like the same person? And you can say, oh, yes. So let's merge, which is the default, import into empty files. So here now I've got Donald's, address information. Before I only had his name and his email address. So now I'm gonna import in and add in the address information. And when I click next, it will run that import and it will bring all of that information into the database. There are other types of imports that allow for you to use, a more exact, way to find duplicates and that is by importing in information using the account number on the field. So there are some really great, knowledge base articles if you go out to the knowledge base. You can get to that by going under the question mark icon here and clicking on knowledge base. If you go to the knowledge base and just type in to search for import, you will find not only information about how to import in different types of, fields or different types of information, but you can also find, sample CSV files that you can use that has columns already set up for you that you can use to work with, within those different types of, imports. And, yes, Judah, thank you for in, recommending the user group page on Facebook. That's a great place for people to go and and share some information. So can you show steps on how to clean up or delete, remove, or merge duplicates account? Yes. So there are a couple of different ways that you can do this here. So let's go to my account here. Now I specifically have a duplicate account set up. So, like, let's say you want to just simply delete the account. If you go into an account, you click on account settings, and here you have delete role. So if you just wanna delete the account, you go into account settings, click on delete role, it will say, hey, Geoff got 40 transactions. Do you want to delete this account and all of the associated transactions? If you do, you click delete. You can also click cancel to save the account and not and, you know, double check all of those journals, entries by going into journal. If you know that, that there is a duplicate here for Geoff, you can click on merge role. You will see here oh, okay. Well, here's somebody that, that has the same account name, different address information. But the key here is click on the person's name, and it will take you into this merge section here. So this was a question that came up before where you have the duplicate and you have the target account. The target account is the account that all of the information is gonna be dumped into. That's gonna be the remaining account. People asked last week which account to keep, the lower number account number or the higher one. I generally and maybe this is just the way my brain works. I tend to keep the earlier number the lowest number, and I think a lot of people agreed with that idea. But the idea is you can switch this by by clicking on switch duplicate and target, and it just swaps which, side the two accounts are on. A lot of people do tend to pick the lower number to be the target just because, as you can see here, while all of these would be moved over into any target account that needed to be filled in, most people feel more comfortable making sure that the information that's being saved is the earlier information. Now where that might be something where you might wanna kinda mess around with is you're here in personas. Well, maybe Geoff new address is on Elm Street, not on Main Street. So what you might wanna do is you might want to replace the persona, but then you know but once you have everything set up the way that you want, merge to make sure no information is overwritten or replaced, replaced for, like, persona information if if the, address is new or something like that. Then once you have everything, you click save, and it will move that information over. Yes. And Jeanette is absolutely correct. If you don't keep the lowest number, you could potentially lose when that person was added to the database. So if that is something that is important, something that you might use in order to find out, when somebody's relationship first started with your organization, yeah, it might be a good idea to keep that. Judith also has a good idea too which is, you know, you can go with the one that has the best data. It it really is going to come down to how, your, you know, how you wanna keep that data in your database. Some people are just gonna say my better data is the higher number, I'm gonna go with that. In Jeanette's situation there, she likes to know when somebody was added to the database, so she goes with the earlier account number. So just some things to kind of keep in mind there as you are kind of working with this. And the same thing goes if you ran the duplicate report. So here, remember I said if we go into reports, click on eTapestry standard reports, the duplicate report is under account reports. And here, I've already run this report so you can view the existing report. So this would be just as if I ran the report just now. And, now I don't have any more left here, but I had the same situation. And there is the situation where you can say, these are not duplicates or these are duplicates. And when you click on these are duplicate account or, you know, you know, it takes you to that same duplicate merge screen that we was just on. It just it displays it slightly differently in the duplicate report. Yes, Brynn. You're exactly right. You can schedule that for later, and it will email you the results. And then when you come back in, it's still going to have this, message here where you can view the existing report. It'll just that date will just show the date and time that it was, scheduled to run previously. Jeanette says, if you merge, won't you get the better data entered into the earlier account? Only if when you do a merge, it's only going to fill in empty information or empty fields in the target account. So if you, if you need to overwrite, then that's when you choose replace. So if you have, like, new, new fields being sold or new information in fields that are were already filled in with with different information. Or in the instance of, like, personas, if you have, new address or something for the primary persona, you put that into the account, with replace as opposed to merge. So it is important to understand whenever you see anything about duplicates, merge fills in empty fields keeping everything else that was already filled in the way it was into that target account, and replace overwrites. So that's that's a key thing to to know what that, what that does. Skip these accounts won't, do anything with them, if you're doing an import, and ignore will create a duplicate account in an import possible duplicate report. Alrighty. I think we've gotten down to the end of our time together here. So just a couple of things to, discuss before we wrap up. As always, keep in mind what your resources are. Blackbaud University does have a training on importing, so that would be a good thing to check out. Of course, you have customer support in the knowledge base to check out, how to steps and and guides and stuff like that that will help you complete, processes that you're running or troubleshoot issues. And, of course, the Blackbaud community, I always recommend people check that out. While it will be a little bit before I probably will have another blog, I do intend to do some more blogs, especially as we get into the summer. So be sure to check that out because that's where I give some, some small tips and tricks in those blogs as well. So, definitely check out the community. As long as you have a Blackbaud ID, you can get into that community and and, check that out. And, of course, if anybody is interested in either joining the Blackbaud champions or the reference program, or if you would like to, tell us your story, and then spotlight your success, please feel free to let me know in the chat. I will then, make sure that the team gets in, involved with you there. The champions is kind of like community plus. You are interacting with other users as well as members of the Blackbaud staff. There's a little bit of a rewards program within there as well. Reference program is where you might, end up talking to a prospective eTapestry client and just kinda talking about some of the things that you do in there. And then, of course, with, the spotlight, your success, that might be where you get to write a blog. You might join me on a webinar, or you might, be asked to join, like, into a podcast or something like that and share those success stories that you have. Thank you once again, everybody, for attending. It's always great to, to chat with everybody. Here in a couple of weeks, there will be another eTapestry webinar coming up. I'm going to get into more of those, those standard reports and talk about, some of the really cool analytical data that can be found there. So I, look forward to seeing you all there again, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.