Importing contacts

Import contacts first — everything else attaches to them.

Preparing the file

Useful columns: first name, last name, address, city, state, postal code, email, phone, and — most importantly — a donor ID or organisation ID.

If your organisation doesn’t provide IDs, use the email address. See Preparing your CSV.

Running the import

1. Go to Import in the left navigation and choose Contacts.

   karani.co/imports/contacts

   

   The upload step. The Contact CSV template link is worth using.

2. Choose your file.

3. Use first row as titles — leave ticked if your CSV has a header row.

4. Overwrite data with blank entries — leave unticked unless you deliberately want blanks in your CSV to erase existing values.

5. Submit.

6. Map your columns. Karani lists each column from your file with a dropdown of Karani fields beside it. Match them up.

7. Process CSV.

Mapping tips

Donor ID maps to Contact Organization ID. This is the field that makes future imports match rather than duplicate.

You can map several columns to one Karani field. If you map both “Fiscal Year” and “Address Last Modified” to Add to Contact Notes, both end up in the notes, concatenated. Useful for source data with fields Karani has no equivalent for.

Leave columns unmapped if you don’t need them. Nothing is imported that you don’t map.

The fields you can map

See the CSV field reference for the full list. The ones people miss:

Karani field	Notes
Contact Organization ID	The matching key. Map it.
Status	Contact, Donor, Prospect, Archive, Lapsed Donor. Otherwise everyone imports with the default.
Spouse fields	First name, last name, title, suffix, birthday.
Annual Giving Potential	For prospects — feeds Prospective Giving.
Birthday / Anniversary	YYYY-MM-DD. Feeds Special Days.
Is Organization? / Is Anonymous?	Y or N.

After the import

Check it before you edit anything

You have 10 minutes to revert an import. But reverting also discards any edits you made to affected contacts in that window — so look first, edit after.

1. Open the contacts list and check the count and a few records.
2. Run Potential Duplicate Contacts.
3. Then import pledges and gifts.

Re-importing later

Running the contacts importer again with the same organisation IDs updates those contacts rather than duplicating them. That’s the intended way to keep Karani in step with your organisation’s records — export from them, import into Karani, repeat.