People is the import everything else depends on. Gifts, notes, check-ins, group leaders and invoice contacts all attach to a person, and they attach far more accurately if the person is already in Studio with their full record rather than being invented from one line of a gift file.
Before You Start
- Export from whichever system is your master directory, not from a secondary tool. See Before You Import.
- If you have a Companies file, import that first. The People import links each person to a company that already exists and will not create one, so an employer column only connects if the company is in Studio.
- Include your old system's person ID column if you have one. It is the single most valuable column in the file.
Running It
- Go to Imports → New Import and pick People. If your file is a list of givers rather than a general directory, pick Donors instead: same fields, and each row also gets a donor profile.
- Pick where the file came from, or Generic CSV.
- Upload, check the mapping, and run.
The Columns Worth Mapping
- Email: how Studio recognizes someone it already has. Running the same file twice updates people instead of duplicating them.
- Their ID in your old system: the strongest match key there is. Map it and every later import from that system lands on exactly the right person, even when someone's email has changed.
- First Name and Last Name, or a single Full Name column. Studio splits a full name for you, including middle names, hyphenated surnames, van and de particles, and Jr / III.
- Household ID: any value that repeats for everyone in one family. After the import, Studio uses it to link spouses, parents and children together.
- Status: active or inactive. Worth mapping even if it looks obvious. Without it, an older file can switch people who had already gone inactive back on.
- Company: their employer, which lands on their contact profile. This is not the same as importing a company. Do not map a business name here on a row that is a business.
Rows That Are Organizations, Not People
Businesses, foundations and trusts that give are real records, and they are not humans. On the review step Studio flags rows whose name looks like an organization and lets you confirm each one. Confirmed rows become organization records rather than a person with a company for a surname.
If your file has a separate column that already says a row is a company, map it to This Row Is a Company, Not a Person. Leave an employer column alone.
Addresses in One Column
If street, city, state and zip are crammed into one cell, map that column to Whole Address in One Column and Studio pulls them apart. If you have separate columns, use those instead: a structured export is always more accurate than a parser.
After It Runs
- The completion screen lists everything created, updated, skipped, and errored, with a link straight to each affected profile.
- People who arrived with too little to be usable, an address and nothing else, wait on the Needs Info page instead of sitting in your directory as a blank row.
- Run the duplicate scanner from People if you imported from more than one source.