How to import your data from Donr into Beacon

Donr are a great UK-based SMS donation service that lets you easily create and manage text giving campaigns. You're only a few steps away from importing your donation data from Donr into Beacon using our pre-built import templates.

There are three templates available, and it's best to use them all to bring in the relevant data available from Donr:

1. Payments
2. Subscriptions
3. Gift Aid declarations

If you haven't already, you can familiarise yourself with the general import process here.

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link Download donations from Donr

We will handily use the same exported spreadsheet from Donr for all three of our imports into Beacon.

1. Log in to Donr, and navigate to 'All Donations'
2. Filter for the donations you'd like, and click to download a CSV of 'Successful Transactions'

error_outline If you open the file in Excel to edit this spreadsheet, be sure to format the phone and date columns before saving again. See here for details.

link Importing payments

The first step is to import the donations as Payments in Beacon.

1. Go to Import data > Manage templates in your sidebar
2. Click 'Create template' and choose the Donr - Payments template. Click 'Create'.

2. The template settings have already been pre-set. Feel free to review them and make the appropriate changes - and then save the template.

3. Go to Import data > Run import. Upload your CSV from Donr, and start the import. Once the import is finished, you'll see this:

link Importing subscriptions

The second step is to import any regular giving information as Subscriptions in Beacon.

1. Go to Import data > Manage templates in your sidebar
2. Click 'Create template' and choose the Donr - Subscriptions template. Click 'Create'.

2. The template settings have already been pre-set. Feel free to review them and make the appropriate changes - and then save the template.

3. Go to Import data > Run import. Upload the same CSV from Donr, and start the import. Once the import is finished, you'll see this:

help_outline If you get an error about duplicate values for 'Subscription ID', you can safely ignore it (it's because there's multiple payments for the same subscription). For best accuracy, run this import at least monthly.

help_outline You may get a couple of duplicate people created if they haven't given their phone number to you. Merge them using our Suggested duplicates feature to easily link everything together.

link Importing Gift Aid declarations

The last step is to import any Gift Aid information as Gift Aid declarations in Beacon.

1. Go to Import data > Manage templates in your sidebar
2. Click 'Create template' and choose the Donr - Gift Aid declarations template. Click 'Create'. template. Click 'Create'.

3. The template settings have already been pre-set. Feel free to review them and make the appropriate changes - and then save the template.

4. Go to Import data > Run import. Upload your newly amended CSV from Donr, and start the import. Once the import is finished, you'll see this:

help_outline You may get a couple of duplicate people created if they haven't given their phone number to you. Merge them using our Suggested duplicates feature to easily link everything together.

check_circle_outline You've imported your donations, as well as linking them to people and creating a subscription record for anyone giving regularly. Not only that, any Gift Aid eligible payments have been added and are ready to claim! I reckon it's time for a cuppa.

link Frequently asked questions

link Can this be automated / Do you have an integration with Donr?

We would love to build a direct integration with Donr to bring all of this data into Beacon automatically for you! At the moment, Donr don't have a public API (the thing we use to bring in the donations), but you can request it by sending Donr a message. The more people that ask for it, the more likely they'll make it available!

link What formatting do I need to do to the spreadsheet?

If you open the spreadsheet from Donr before importing, Excel has a habit of changing the format of the date and phone number columns in the spreadsheet to try and be helpful. To make sure your import works smoothly, format the columns as follows before saving:

1. Select the 'msisdn' (phone number) column, and change the format to '0' by going to Format > Cells... > Custom > 0
2. Select the 'payment_date' and 'giftaid_date' columns, and change the format to '2012-03-14' by going to Format > Cells... > Date > 2012-03-14 (or YYYY-MM-DD)

link How do I know which donors we can contact?

As part of importing, Beacon automatically sets a donor's 'Contact preferences' to 'Phone' and 'SMS' for anyone that had consented when they made their donation via Donr.

If the donor was already in your database, we will have updated their record to include these contact consents.

help_outline Tip: To find anyone with one these preferences, filter People for 'Contact preferences is any of: Phone, SMS'

link Why have some duplicate people been created?

Donr don't provide the full phone number for anyone that hasn't consented to marketing contact from you, so we cant match those people up from the imports.

However, it's easy to go ahead and merge the duplicates using the Suggested duplicates feature - Their names and addresses will match so will show up in this list!