Whenever I write a bespoke customisation for a client that needs to look up a constituent based on some biographical information I normally use the functionality available behind the scenes in IDLookup. If you are unfamiliar with IDLookup, it allows users to feed in an Excel or CSV file of names, addresses, aliases, attributes and all sorts of biographical information. Then based on criteria that you define, it will look to see if one or more constituents already exist in The Raiser’s Edge. I use much of the look-up functionality in other projects simply because Blackbaud chose not to make this functionality easily available. There is no back-end interface to their regular constituent look-up screen which is a real shame. The nearest feature is the IBBRecordFinder interface.
I have covered this a couple of time before (hence the more and more obscure title) in various posts; here and here but I have been preparing IDLookup for install on Blackbaud’s OnDemand hosting service. Among several requirements is the fact that you have to install the plug-ins manually and not through an installer.
A lot of the work that I do involves the integration of third party products with The Raiser’s Edge. It is not always right to develop a custom application to perform this integration. There are many factors including the volume of data transfer, the complexity of data, how quickly the data needs to be integrated and of course what budget is available. This article attempts to outline the options available to Raiser’s Edge managers who need to integrate with non-Blackbaud products.
This screencast of IDLookup shows you how perform a lookup based on data coming in from an online donation page. The data is downloaded from the website without constituent ids. We run IDLookup and find several matches. We are now able to import the data into The Raiser’s Edge with existing constituent information being updated and new constituents being created.
For more information about IDLookup or to download a fully working version (tied to the sample database) visit the IDLookup download page.
Zeidman Development are excited to announce the release of IDLookup 2.0.
It has been totally rewritten to give it a new look and feel but that is the least of it. The new version includes:
Instead of just one set of criteria you can have many. The plug-in will try to match against each criteria set until it finds either a unique match or the match with the fewest multiples. Save your criteria sets for later use.
Review multiple matches more easily. The multiples are now cross referenced to another worksheet in Excel so you can see the values from Raiser’s Edge and compare them to values in the file
Match last or organisation name on aliases
Match on date of birth.
Address equivalents are now customizable from within IDLookup in a new easier to use interface
User interface is localized for UK, US and for Canadian English language
And what is more Zeidman Development is keeping its pledge and making this latest upgrade to our existing users absolutely free.
I am pleased to announce the release of IDLookup version 1.1.5. This is just an incremental upgrade with the small additions of support for searching by title and by gender.
As always if you already own a copy of IDLookup then follow this link to download the new version. Use the same serial number if prompted.
If you do not own a copy then why not download a trial version at Zeidman Development. And now for a limited time only (thanks to Her Majesty’s government) UK buyers can get the reduced VAT rate! If you are buying from outside of the UK then take advantage of the low exchange rate. Due to the exchange rate the US dollar equivalent price is now 27% lower than it was four weeks ago!
There was a post on Blackbus recently where a Raiser’s Edge user was having trouble mapping the output of a third party system to RE. The other system had the constituent system id and did not have the import id or the constituent ids so importing the data directly into RE was proving to be a problem. It would also be difficult to do any kind of lookup natively in RE unless it was done manually through a query.
I suggested that this was a straight forward solution if you were to write a plugin. In fact I felt that it was so straight forward that I would just write it. So here it is a new plugin that takes a system constituent id and outputs the constituent and import ids appending them to a copy of the input file.
Zeidman Development is pleased to announce the latest release of IDLookup. With this latest release (version 1.1.4) we bring you some exciting additions:
Use your search criteria against a spouse record.
Previously we introduced address equivalents (a match against “1 High Street” would also match “1 High St”, or “1 High St.”). In this latest release we allow you to customize the address equivalents list so that you can add new equivalents and change existing ones.
A user guide. (a long sought after addition)
If you have not checked out IDLookup for a while then there are many new features including:
Matching on the first few characters of fields
Making your search accent insensitive (e.g. côté matches against côte, coté and cote)
Matching on maiden name
Filtering the results on specific constituent codes or constituent attributes.
If you already own a full license of IDLookup then download this latest versionnow for free. Otherwise download a full working version of IDLookup (restricted to the sample database)
If you need any help installing IDLookup, wish to purchase it or have any feedback then please do not hesitate to contact us
In this post I hope to offer some help in installing IDLookup. Many people have downloaded it but it may not be so straight forward to install. Note that these instructions can also be used for installing Query Manager.
If you do not know what IDLookup is here is a brief outline. IDLookup is a plugin that I have created to lookup records in Raiser’s Edge given a list of constituents and their address details. This is useful where you have a third party list given that does not contain your constituent ids (such as many giving sites e.g. JustGiving, FirstGiving, CharityWeb, etc) or cold lists that you want to ensure really are cold. The application can be found on Zeidman Development ->IDLookup. This is a demo version that is tied to the sample database.
May 4th, 2010 by 
David Zeidman
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