Data and File Specifications

To best serve the goals of trend analysis and peer group comparisons, we recommend limiting the type of gifts included in your data output. In our experience, not all gifts are best used for benchmarking or for year-over-year trend analysis, as some gift types cause irregularities in key metrics, and these variables can make the data less actionable.

We can take data from any system.

Tip: If you have a data conversion planned, we recommend you submit data with your current system to ensure you get access to your key metrics right away.

  • Date range of transactions

    • We request the entire transaction history.

    • We recommend sending all years, not just recent years or this can change your metrics.

  • Fields

    • Please include the following three fields in your transactional export:

      • Account ID / Constituent ID: There should be one unique account ID per donor.

      • Gift Date: This is the date the payment was received, and the field should be in the MM/DD/YYYY format. Please exclude timestamps.

      • Payment Amount: he format should be 9999999.99. Please exclude currency symbols and commas.

  • Types of transactions

    • Please send all hard credit transactions (gifts and pledge payments) made by an individual donor.

    • Exclude transactions above $100,000 ($100,000.01 and above)

    • Exclude Pledge Promises

    • Exclude Merchandise Purchases

    • Exclude Charitable Gift Annuities

  • We also recommend that you exclude the following gift types, if possible, but it is not required:

    • Bequests

    • Planned gifts

    • Very large, infrequent or non-repeated capital campaigns

    • Combined donations from events

    • Combined group donations (schools, sidewalk donations, church checks for multiple parishioner gifts/ drives)

  • Formatting:

  • Send a flat ASCII file that is either pipe-delimited (“|”), comma-separated (.txt or .csv files), or fixed-width. A layout document is required for all fixed-width files. Tab-delimited formatting should be avoided when possible. Our preferred format is pipe-delimited.

    • Use a 4-digit year format for all data fields (e.g., DD-MM-YYYY, YYYY/MM/DD, etc.).

    • Be sure that all records end with a carriage return and a linefeed.