What Is ‘Pre-Existing’ Data?

Pre-existing data is information about your members that you’ve already gathered from other sources. For instance, you may have street addresses, organization names, titles or other info from event registration forms. Or you may have information such as year of graduation, program name, etc. that you naturally store in your database program.  Ideally, you’d prefer not to ask people questions you already have answers to, but you might want that data to be included in your network map.

You could always load that data directly into a map separately (using data-flow options 1 or 3), but the simplest way to get everything lined up and current is to load that data you’ve already gathered into the sumApp survey.

This can be done in Tiers III and IV.

How to load that extra data:

Loading the data requires setting up your spreadsheet so sumApp knows how to configure the fields. This will enable members to see what data you have, be able to edit it if they need to, and enable them to input answers if you didn’t have existing info on specific individuals.

This template shows how your data needs to be configured in your spreadsheet before you can load it into sumApp.

It looks like this: 

The First Name, Last Name, Email and Segment columns are required, and should be formatted the same as for the ‘Add Member’ CSV upload. Email 2 and Email 3 are optional, but must be between Email and Segment if you include them.

Format the column headers to the right of ‘Segment’ as defined below.

Once your headers are set up properly, load the data-sheet just as you would a simple member list. The column headers will be appended to the survey, as if they were originally set up as survey questions in the survey builder.
If you’ve already loaded members into sumApp, this new upload will match on their email addresses, and their questions to those new survey questions will be prefilled with the data from the spreadsheet.

Pre-Existing Data Column Header Format

Columns E and further to the right show how to set up the column header for data that fits into the different field-types.

Here is the general format:

Question Type* | Question | Option 1 | Option 2 | . . . | [[maximum options]]

Question Type –

 This can be:  Checkbox, Radio, Select (dropdown), Text Input, or Text Area.

Required –

If there is an Asterisk * at the end of the “Question Type,” e.g., “Checkbox*” then the question is required. Otherwise, it is not.

Question –

This is the text for the question.

Option 1 | Option 2

If applicable (Checkbox, Select, or Radio question types) your options must be listed out, with each option separated from the others by a pipe-separator.  e.g. “Radio* | What is your age range? | 18-25 | 26-35 | 36-45 | 46-55 | 55+”

[[N]] – N = how many options the user is allowed to select. This is ONLY usable by checkbox question type and can be ignored elsewhere. It must be the end element. If this is not at the end of a checkbox element or if it is set to 0, i.e. [{0}] then there is no limit.

Examples for N

Checkbox | What issues are you interested in connecting with others around | Arts, Culture, and Humanities | Economic Development | Education | Health | Human Rights | Spirituality/Religion | [[3]]

      User can select a maximum of 3 options

Checkbox | What issues are you interested in connecting with others around | Arts, Culture, and Humanities | Economic Development | Education | Health | Human Rights | Spirituality/Religion | [[0]]      User can select any number of optionsCheckbox | What issues are you interested in connecting with others around | Arts, Culture, and Humanities | Economic Development | Education | Health | Human Rights | Spirituality/Religion      User can select any number of options

Tim’s Header Maker

If getting your data configured looks daunting, Tim made a cool little VBA script that can help you extract your option list from a column of data and configure the headers for upload. It’s a zipped excel macro-enabled file you’ll need to download. Download Tim’s Header Maker. Instructions on how to use Tim’s Header Maker can be found here.

Understanding How Your Pre-Existing Data Will Impact the sumApp Survey and database.

Learn more about loading pre-existing data here.