Nonprofit eTapestry Migration Details and Best Practices

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eTapestry Migration and Best Practices

eTap is a complex database that can do lots of things. There is a lot going on in this app and the data structure reflects that. If you're migrating a group that has been using eTap intensely, beware, the migration won't be easy!

Data Structure

Some interesting things about eTap data structure:

  • eTapestry has the concept of Accounts--they can be a person or an Organization.
    • You'll have to split this table into people and orgs for Salesforce.com
  • An Account can have multiple personas, that is people as a part of it
    • the Executive Director and Admin Assistant at a foundation don't necessarily have their own Account records, but could be personas on the Foundation's Account
    • Personas can also be used to capture multiple addresses for individuals
    • Personas can make it really hard to get the data out easily
  • Households;
    • Every account is assumed to be in a household, and has summary household donation information.
    • [as I understand it] households are relationships between accounts [stored in relationship table?]
  • Gifts, Pledges, Communications, and Tasks/events are all tracked in the Journal
    • It's one big table of things related to an Account
    • Events (Task/Event) can be connected to multiple Accounts via "Invites".
    • there are tons of money fields: payment, received, pledged, balance, credit, writeoff, etc.
  • Relationships between accounts are stored in a separate table
  • Files that are attached to eTap records cannot be exported from the system

Getting Data Out

To pull data out of eTapestry you will have to:

  1. Build a query (query builder user interface is not that intuitive -- beware)
  2. Create a Report/Export "Category"
  3. Create the actual export from within the Report/Export Category you

just created (here's where you can choose the fields you want to display in the export) then run the export (these are separate menu areas and have to be done in that order).

You can't create a query and then just export the content to a csv file.

Also: in the Report/Export menu area you will see two options, eTapestry Standard *Reports* and Etapestry Standard *Exports*. One might intuitively go here and expect to be able to pull all the donor data. You can't.

The eTapestry Standard Exports menu contains pre-built exports for accounting and NCOA validation, etc. You will see an export called "Donor Everything" -- you may think, "Perfect -- Here's where I export all my donor/donation data." Wrong! Unfortunately, this report is only summarized information and does not contain all the fields of data you will need.

Last, eTapestry does not include the primary keys in their exports. So if you export the data yourself, you may need to chop up the file and create your own key structure separating out the demographic codes from the financial data.

For a fee, eTapestry may provide you with all the data, I have not asked.

People with Experience on this platform

--Steve Andersen (steve_andersen) 16:17, 15 June 2007 (PDT)
--Cheryl Gipson, Network For Good powerd by Groundspring
--Jenny Council, netCorps