If it’s taking too long, there is a faster way…
As I was getting ready to print our labels for this year’s Christmas cards, I first needed to add the address for about 80 of our clients in our CiviCRM. Piece of cake, right? Yes, if you take advantage of the Batch Update via Profile. Unfortunately, I was unaware of this feature, so this simple task took me a whole day to complete.
I performed a search for all of our customers’ employees. Once the results were displayed, I proceeded to edit each contact that didn’t have an address. In order to do this, I had to go to every single contact record. Every time I finished adding and saving the address to a contact, I would have to run the search again and then edit the following contact without an address. This was time consuming and cumbersome.
What I should have done instead, was:
Make sure I had a Profile with the correct fields that needed to be completed:
- Administer > Customize Data and Screens > Profiles
- Add Profile
- Under Profile Name, I chose Address as the profile name
- Save
- This brings you to the CiviCRM Profile Fields Screen. I picked Individual from the dropdown menu next to field name.
- This brings another drop down menu, and I picked First Name
- Click on Save and New
- This brings you to the CiviCRM Profile Fields Screen again. I picked Individual from the dropdown menu next to field name.
- This brings another drop down menu, and I picked Last Name
- Click on Save and New
- This brings you to the CiviCRM Profile Fields Screen again. I picked Contacts from the dropdown menu next to field name.
- This brings another drop down menu, and I picked Street Address, etc. until I had all the fields I needed to be updated for my labels.
After customizing my profiles, I:
- Searched for all contacts that are Employees of our Customers (this is a smart group – check our video tip: How to create Smart Groups)
- Select those contacts without an address
- In the dropdown menu, selected Batch update via Profile. Click on Go.
- In one screen, I can update everybody’s address without having to go to each individual’s contact record.
This is just one of the many ways you can use Batch update via Profile. You can use this functionality any time you need to update a large number of records all at once, such as choosing a volunteer’s interest or day they are able to work, for example. If you haven’t used this yet, try it. I guarantee it will make your life easier.
Comments
This is a great tip, using Batch Update via Profile.
Just wanted to give a comment on this:
I performed a search for all of our customers’ employees. Once the results were displayed, I proceeded to edit each contact that didn’t have an address. In order to do this, I had to go to every single contact record. Every time I finished adding and saving the address to a contact, I would have to run the search again and then edit the following contact without an address. This was time consuming and cumbersome.
After you click on one (preferably the first) contact record in a search result list, you will also have the option on the top left of the basic contact tab, of clicking "Next", to go to the next result in the Search list, without needing to set up the search (criterias) again.