How to match Activities to Contacts during import?

Question

We recently distributed supplies to many of our members and used a GoogleForm to create a .csv spreadsheet to track the number of supplies given to each member. We imported the names of any new members into CiviCRM.

We would like to import the activities, but we are having trouble assigning the activities to the appropriate contact.

We have separate columns for first name, last name, address, but don't have emails for all contacts, and the .csv does not have a Contact ID for each contact. How do we import the activities? We could also just create one activity and batch update the details, but in every case we can't seem to figure out how to get all the contacts assigned to the activity. It's about 300 contacts, so we'd rather not enter it manually!

Answer 1

You might want to reconsider importing your data as activities, which tend to turn into a bit of a junk-drawer of stuff. Maybe a custom field, either of the member or the contact?

Answer 2

Export the contacts with their contact ID, first name and last name. (Hopefully you have a way of searching for just the new contacts, but if not, exporting a larger group of contacts will be OK)

Open each CSV in something like Excel or Calc and create a combined "First Last name column in both. You can then use vlookup (in Excel) or the equivalent in Calc to add the contact id to the list of activites you want to import.