Is there a way to preserve existing data when importing into multiselect and checkbox fields?

Question

My use case involves lots of importing, and extensive use of multiselect fields (to track things like skills, interests, etc). Sometimes we get new information about, for instance, an existing contact's skills. We want to include this new info in our import. But of course importing with "fill" overwrites the old information. We want to keep the old information and add the new information to it.

Unfortunately this is not something we thought about when we designed our fields and processes!

I am looking for advice on a (non-manual) process that a non-technical user could do to achieve the intended outcome (appending additional values to multiselect fields).

If anyone has any experience with this I would much appreciate your insight.

Answer 1

Depends on how you define non-manual. Only non-technical I know of is

1. import just the cid, add to group as part of import, then export

2. do a vlookup, and get your new data and old data for those fields on same spreadsheet

3. use CONCATENATE to combine your new 'option values' with the existing 'option values'

4. do import

Answer 2

If you are doing that regularly, you could write an extension to upload your csv, fetch the current values, merge in the new data and then update the contact.

Creating the extension is technical but it should be easy for non-technical users to run it.