Importing your data
Import your prospects, donors, or any other list of people to see DonorAtlas profiles on each. This article explains the process of importing your data.
Import your prospects, donors, or any other list of people to see DonorAtlas profiles on each. This article explains the process of importing your data.
Importing is how you match your own list of people to DonorAtlas. Upload a CSV and we'll match each row to a person in the DonorAtlas database.
If your donors live in Salesforce or Raiser's Edge NXT, our native integrations skip the CSVs entirely, so you can see DonorAtlas information right inside your CRM.
Imports are .csv files only — if your donors are in Excel, save the sheet as a CSV first. Each row is one donor, and needs a name and at least one other field. The more you provide, the better your match rate. These are the fields DonorAtlas recognizes:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | Required. Either one Full Name column, or separate First and Last (and optionally Middle) columns. |
| Address / Location | Street, city, state, ZIP — if you have some of this info, that's fine too! A row can have multiple addresses, and they can be either parsed (into street, city, state, and zip) or un-parsed (text). |
| Employer(s) | List of employers, comma-separated (one employer is also fine) |
| Occupation(s) | List of occupations ("doctor", "lawyer"), comma-separated |
| School(s) | List of schools the person attended, comma-separated |
| Linkedin URL or Linkedin handle | |
| Custom fields | Kept as your own custom fields — giving history, internal codes, IDs. Private to your team, and available in any export. |
You don't need to rename or reorder anything before uploading: DonorAtlas maps your columns automatically.
Include any custom constituent IDs. If your file comes from a CRM, or you have some other ID attached to your prospects for your own systems, add each record's constituent ID as a column. That way, when you export from DonorAtlas, you can include this custom ID to re-associate the information with your data correctly.
The import box lives on your page and on the page. From there:
Drop in your CSV
Drag your file onto the box, or click .
Name your list
Every import becomes a list, so pick a name you'll recognize later.
Review the column mapping
DonorAtlas auto-maps your columns to the fields above, with sample values from your file so you can check its work. Click Edit Mapping to adjust any column by hand. Unrecognized columns become your custom fields.
Confirm and import
You'll see how many import credits the file will use. Click Import, and matching starts immediately.
Here's what the import box itself looks like:
A progress bar at the top of your new list shows donors being matched and researched in real time. You don't need to keep the page open — the list fills in on its own. Files over 10,000 rows are handled personally by our team, and your list is ready within 24 hours.
Your imported donors live on the list you named, on the page. From there you can search within the list, filter it, open full profiles, and export it at your convenience.
Not every row will match, and that's expected: when we can't confidently identify someone, we leave the row unmatched rather than match to the wrong person.
The best way to raise your match rate is to include more identifying columns, especially addresses and employers.
The donor information you import is never shared with third parties or used to train our AI models, and your data stays private to your team. DonorAtlas is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, which means our security and privacy controls are independently audited on an ongoing basis.
Once your list is matched, your donors are ready to work with! In the next article, we'll cover getting your data back out — as spreadsheets or PDFs, with your original columns included.