Every so often we get a support question from a user asking us how they can import data like the following that appears in one Excel column:

“Dr David A Zeidman PhD”

We have invariably told them that this is very difficult to manage and that they would have to manually break up the one column into the 5 separate components (title, first name, middle name, last name and suffix) so that they could map them.

With Importacular 3.5 (available now for self-hosted organizations and coming within an indeterminate period of time for Blackbaud hosted users) you are able import combined fields like this.

The new constituent area settings allows you to split one field on your incoming file or data source into parts. The logic takes into consideration common titles, first name and last name (taken from US survey data) as well as suffixes. It also handles multi-word last names e.g. Von Trap or De La Fuente.

What is the best part of this? There is absolutely no extra cost to use this feature. It is included as standard irrespective of whether you have purchased any other data sources.

Download the latest version of Importacular now!