We have always had a product that imports data into The Raiser’s Edge. We would regularly customise it for non-profits so that it would adhere to their business rules and bring in their data in a format that they wanted it to. Then came along the somewhat more well known import tool for the Raiser’s Edge (do I really have to mention names?) and our quiet workhorse was, not quite put down, but put to rest.

In recent years however we have had some requests to bring it back. The reason stems mainly from our Audit Trail and Validatrix clients who regularly use the other well known product but would also like to save all the changes that are made in Audit Trail and prevent data from entering Raiser’s Edge making use of their Validatrix business rules.

We also had a number of third party suppliers of data ask us the best way to get data into RE and could we help them.

So a plan was formed to resurrect our long forgotten import tool, integrate Audit Trail and Validatrix and update it with the best bits from IDLookup and The Mergician. We also did what only we do best. We integrated it directly with other third party data sources.  And so was born Importacular!

We built, for want of a better word, a plug-in architecture so that adding new third party data sources does not mean a release of the new version of the application. Instead we could add new data sources remotely to the application with the end user deciding to activate them and install the client assemblies. Once you were used to the main application, selecting a new data source component would be a breeze. It would follow the same pattern as all the other data sources that you had used previously.

We are really excited about the future for Importacular and being able to help non-profits of all sizes to get their data into Raiser’s Edge without pulling their hair out over Excel and CSV files.