CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm new to CiviCRM and we're converting from Access.  I'd appreciate need some help on one step.  First some background.

1.  We have about 4,300 contact records. While some are single people, married couples, households, etc., it seems easiest to import them as  Individual Contacts and my tests have been perfect.  IMPORTANT: We are including a unique "external identifier" (provided in Access and wonderfully accommodated in CiviCRM) when we do this import.

2.  After doing Step 1, we've successfully imported and "attached" donation records to the 500 above-added contacts who have made donations.  The secret to doing this was the "External Identifier (match to contact)" feature of the built-in Contribution Import wizard.  MIRACULOUS!  By using the Access unique identifier, all of the contributions end up associated with the correct Contact created in  Step 1 above.  Hooray!

3.  My last step is to include about 1,000 birthdays we have.  We use the info to send cards (when we know an address) and announce on the radio (whether address i known or not).  I'm stumped.

-- In our current Access Database, we basically have a table of TO (name), DATE (birthday), NOTE (information to read on air) and EXTERNAL IDENTIFIER (Match to Contact).  This latter field is (1) blank if we do not know an address or (2) populated with the unique EXTERNAL IDENTIFIER when we know the address.  We then can:

a.  Select birthdays within a date range and prepare a table of TO, NOTE to read on radio for ALL birthdays.

b.  Send postal cards for those with populated EXTERNAL IDENTIFIER fields with Access printing the labels.

c.  Confidently know that a change in the master contact ADDRESS will propagate to the associated birthday records linked by EXTERNAL IDENTIFIER.

My brain says that CiviCRM can manage the birthday data, but I can't figure out how.  One thought is to import as new individual contacts but -- unlike the New Contribution routine -- there is no "match the external identifier" to make sure the birthdays are connected to the right contact record. 

One thought is to make a new Birthday "tab" (if this is even possible) and import the data similar to Contributions, except with appropriate parameters.

It seems that the relationships feature could also play a role, but I don't see how to mass import them.

Finally, we *could* do our initial contact import as Households (see Step 1 above), but this does not seem to change the possibilities.

My apologies for all of the detail, but I hope it helps.  Any ideas would be greatly appreciated as this our last hurdle.

Thanks.

Thanks for the reply, Pete!  The Import Contact field mapping drop down-box shows the option of:

External Identifier*

but not:

External Identifier (match to contact)*

I tested External Identifier* against existing records (with matching external identifiers), and the import always created new records rather than relating the imported contacts to the existing ones.  My tests also included beginning with Household records as well as Individual records (no difference).

This second variation *is* available in the Import Contribution field-matching tool and achieved the correct result.  For Import Contacts, the only "match to contact" field seems to be:

Email (match to contact)*

Unfortunately, I don't have email addresses for many of the records so this kind of match wouldn't work.  I tried to create a custom field that would behave like
External Identifier (match to contact)*, but this was not possible.

One other attempt I made was to use the Import Contact field of:

Is household member of/External Identifier*

but this also created additional, unrelated records. I

Any other ideas are greatly appreciated.

Also, it just occurred to me...maybe the issue related to dupe checking!  I'm pretty sure I selected no dupe checking. Perhaps "update" is what is needed if the records are to become relationships to the initial record, but it seems to me this would run the risk of overwriting it.

Thanks.  I appreciate your help as I know this must be possible.

I'll try that, although since these are birthdays of family members, I think they'd need a name, too... That could possibly be done in a second pass since external ID/birthday would have a unique name that I could have Access tabulate.

My original question was so long it may have been tough to understand . My initial imported contacts are something like:

External ID/First/Last/...(contact info)

Giving us, say, two records like:

2312/Larry and Mary/Jones/... 123 Main Street...
2313/Devon/Smith/... 124 Elm Street...

Some of the legacy records are couples,  some singles,  etc.  And the birthday data is not always present.  So my thought was to approach the birthday data by making a separate simple related contact that would be used when birthday data is known.

Ah,  you are helping...my hope for having them "related"  purely so that if a Household (or main contact record)  has an address change,  all of the related birthdays would also receive the address change. It's almost like need to make  ew records that would be created as:

Name (Access database) -> Contact Name
Birthday (Access) -- > Birthday
External Identifier (Access) --> Specifies the related record the postal address should  be copied from

Maybe I need to start with Household records,  although documentation and field drop down menu seem to
Indicate Individual and Household  behave the same.

That's it precisely!  And I'm fine without using households (unless needed for this to work and,  as you noted,  addresses needn't belong to a Household to be shared).

But there does not seem to be a clean import technique that says,  in essence,  Get address from External Identifier = xxxx.