The giving import brings your gift history into Studio: one row per gift, matched to the person who gave it. Get this right and year-end statements, donor totals and every giving report are correct without anyone touching them.
Before You Start
- Import People or Donors first. Studio will create a person for a gift that matches nobody, but that person is only a name and an email. Importing the directory first means every gift lands on a full record.
- Export from your master giving system, not from both your online giving tool and your management system. Importing both is how the same gift arrives twice.
- Decide your date range before you export. Most orgs bring across everything; some bring the current and prior tax year only.
Running It
- Go to Imports → New Import and pick Donations / Giving history.
- Pick your source. Studio has the exact column names for the common platforms, so most files map themselves.
- Upload, review the mapping, and run.
Getting Gifts on the Right Person
Studio matches each gift in this order:
- Donor's ID in your old system. Exact, and immune to a donor changing their email. Map it whenever your file has it.
- Donor's email. Reliable, unless a household shares one address.
- Donor's name. A last resort. Two people called James Whitfield are one person to a name match.
Map more than one and Studio uses the strongest available on each row.
The Columns That Matter Most
- Gift Date and Amount: required on every row.
- Transaction ID from your old system: map it. It is what stops the same gift importing twice if you ever re-run the file.
- Fund: Studio creates any fund it doesn't have yet, so keep the spelling consistent or you will end up with “Missions” and “missions fund” as two funds.
- Fee and Net Amount: what the processor took and what reached your bank. Worth mapping if you reconcile against deposits.
- Check Number: makes matching paper gifts back to bank deposits straightforward.
- Status: completed, refunded, failed or pending. A blank status is treated as completed, so refunded gifts must say so or they will count toward totals.
Fees and Donor-Covered Fees
Map Amount as the gift before any fee came out, and Net Amount as what actually landed. Studio works out the donor-covered position from those two. You do not need a separate yes / no column for it, and mapping one from a platform that uses it differently can drop gifts.
After It Runs
- Check a handful of donors against your old system: lifetime total, last gift date, gift count.
- Look at Giving → Funds for near-duplicate fund names and merge any you find.
- Anything that didn't match is on the completion screen with a downloadable error report.
Undoing It
Click Revert this import and every gift it created is removed, with all affected donor totals recalculated. See Reverting an Import.