Donor Manager Software

I'd like to be able to export *everything* in my db. I'm thinking especially of gifts, notes and special days tab. Right now it looks like I can only export address/phone information. I wanted to try out tntMPD and couldn't figure out how to get the information out of DM. I've decided I'm not going to switch (at least at this point), but it would be useful to get all the information *out* that I've put *in*.

You are correct. In version 5.xx of the Donor Manager, it doesn't export the gifts, touches, etc. files.

But, in DM 6.x, full export capabilitites will be in there.

But, I'll see if I can quickly write a full exporter for the the next version of the 5.xx series. It's actually quite easy to do.

I hope this will include bascking up and restoring pictures. I maintain Donor Mgr on my PC at home and my laptop at work. I do backup and restore from one machine to the other to include any changes made on the other machine.

If you want to backup and restore pictures as well as your donor data, the "Pack and Go" routine is the way to go.

It does all of that with just a click or two.

And it backs up everything.

Just a note of trivia (which may be of interest to some of you): the current "pack and go" file has the extension "tza" which is a proprietary compressed file format, very similar to a "zip" file, but it uses a slightly different approach.

I'm moving toward using a standard "zip" file format for the "pack and go" in future versions of the Donor Manager (beginning with 6.0).

A very valuable variant on this would be to export the other fields needed for a mailmerge (paper or electronic) along with gifts that have not yet been thanked, preferably also filtering for donors who have at least some unthanked gifts.

Lack of this feature makes the whole mechanism for importing gift information useless to me. I don't even bother importing them; I just export everything to Excel and add an unthanked gifts column and fill it in by hand.

I just downloaded the DM6 Beta hoping to be able to export touches, but I can't find any option to do so. Am I missing it somewhere?

Thanks!

Tell me a bit more about what you mean "export touches."

I'm not quite sure I follow what you would like to see happen here.

Thanks John,

I'd like to be able to get out a CSV file that has two important pieces of information that are particularly important to us. The most important is actually the comments, secondly it would be great if we could have a list of all the touches that we have made with that partner.

Thanks!

Ok. That's helpful information.

A few comments / follow up questions:

A CSV file is designed to contain one line per "record." In the DM, each touch is considered an individual "record" ... as a sub-table of the donor manager file.

So, for example, I can give you a CSV that has your donor data in it (including comments ... to a certain extent ... there is a limit), but not the "touch" records.

Or, I can give you a CSV that has the touch records, but not the comments.

So, let me ask the next question: what will you do with this CSV file? Generally, a CSV file is used to export / import data between programs. So, where are you going with this data?

Understanding that will help me figure out the best approach here.

Thanks John,

From what I understand, it sounds like I could have two CSV files that contain all of this data. Is that right?

I'm using these files as we are moving away from running windows on our macbook. The computer is becoming too outdated and full to run windows and OSX at the same time so we need to be able to access this from within OSX. I'm looking at a mac native iMissions program, but I don't think it will actually handle the importing very well. Regardless, I can transition during our next itineration by opening this information in Excel and referring back to it for a few months.

Gotcha.

I'm not familiar with that software, so I don't know what data import features it offers.

I'll try to research that a bit and see if there is a way I can make it easy for you to migrate your data over there.

I'm really wanting to add native Mac support to the DM (it won't be in DM 6, but almost certainly will be in DM 7), but that's at least a year away.

We'll figure a way to make this migration as simple as possible for you.

The key thing is that the "daughter tables" that link to the donor master file have to have a "key" field that can link the tables together. Once we get that figured out, we can make it work.

OK. I found a bit about iMissions software:

http://imissionspro.org

This is a FileMaker based application, so we should be able to make a way to import your Donor Manager data into it.

There are a lot of variables, but FileMaker is indeed capable of importing files that the DM can export.

Now, whether or not the author of iMissions has that built into the program or not will be the key question.

This would be amazing for us. Thanks for looking into it!

Hey John,

No pressure on this, because it's certainly beyond the scope of your expected duties as a developer, but I'm trying to migrate that data soon. Just wondering if you had any updated info for us.

Thanks!

Thanks for the reminder on this.

I just moved back to the states for 6 months and this had "fallen off my radar."

I did look at the program (nice software!) and it does have a function to import names. Not sure about giving history though.

Give me a few more days (I'll be travelling for the next several days) and I'll dig a little deeper.