Samaritan’s Purse UK Discovers More Efficient Way to Import Constituent Data

Samaritan’s Purse was founded on the principle of providing assistance for those in need based on Biblical principles. For over 40 years, Samaritan’s Purse has worked to aid to the world’s poor, sick, and suffering by providing food, medicine, and other assistance around the globe. Currently, the organization is involved in an array of aid efforts globally including helping victims affected by natural disasters, war, disease, and famine. The organization also works to develop vocational programs in impoverished villages and neighborhoods to help break the cycle of poverty. The Samaritan’s Purse is headquartered in North Carolina with offices in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Members of the Samaritan’s Purse UK were met with the challenge of importing a large file of over 35,000 constituents into Raiser’s Edge. Even with a team of eight, it was expected to take approximately four months to manually enter all of the information with the existing import tool in Raiser’s Edge while checking for duplications.

In addition to the large file import, the organization also regularly imported constituent data from a variety of other sources. They manually entered the data into Raiser’s Edge but spent a large amount of time checking and de-duplicating records. The organization also faced the challenge of keeping up with holiday gift records as the volume increased significantly and caused a backlog of work for the organization.

Samaritan’s Purse UK was introduced to ImportOmatic, an import tool for Raiser’s Edge. Developed by Omatic Software, ImportOmatic allows for data to be imported into Raiser’s Edge from just about any source while checking for duplicate records on the fly.

After viewing a webinar on ImportOmatic, one of the Samaritan’s Purse UK Support Relations Team Members, Gemma Pearse, advocated for the import tool as a way to bring in the large file into their Raiser’s Edge database more efficiently. She was impressed with the functionality of duplication checking as well as the ability to import all data at one time, in the background, while accomplishing other tasks.

After implementing ImportOmatic, the organization was able to then import the large document containing various criteria: individual constituents, addresses, actions, attributes, and a relationship link to an organization. Regarding the individual records, ImportOmatic was able to determine duplicate records and update the information on existing records where appropriate.

ImportOmatic was also able to help with the wording discrepancies with the organization names as well as match all the imported data to the existing database. This criteria alone would have taken months to sort through. As ImportOmatic was able to identify possible matches, it made the process much more efficient.

Samaritan’s Purse UK now imports all profiles within ImportOmatic as a measure to ensure that the information is pulled into Raiser’s Edge consistently. It has also allowed for ease of training new employees since the parameters are already defined with all import types.