Data management "out of the box"
Posted by:
ChrisOjeda on
June 30, 2008 at
7:01PM EST
Convio's ability to engage your constituents online and to acquire new constituents gives your organization the opportunity to capture up to date information, such as addresses, phone numbers and, especially, email addresses. As an organization with a Convio powered web presence, you have the ability to send and receive this information to and from your organization's local database for a single view of your constituents.
Convio's built-in solution to online-offline data management is known as data synchronization. Convio DataSync lets you easily exchange data between Constituent360 and an offline database to keep information current and accurate. These DataSync tools can be found by logging in as a Convio admin to your site and navigating to Data Management -> Import/Export. The operations listed under the "All Data Sync Operations" tab allow you to download constituent data (Constituent Data Download) as well as update and add new constituents (Constituent Data Upload). There is even an operation to download transaction information (Transaction Information Download).
These DataSync operations send and receive data via comma-delimited, or csv, text files, with the first row containing the field names. The offline database needs the ability to import and export these types of files to take advantage of the DataSync. While the actual data in these csv files may not be formatted to be "received" by the respective database, these files could be further manipulated, or "transformed", by your organization to meet any formatting requirements. For example, Convio stores "Yes" and "No" as a number (1 and 0, respectively). If your offline database requires a "Yes" or "No" text value for a particular field, you would need to interpret, or convert, this to 1 or 0 accordingly.
