Before you start
MonkeyPod keeps donors and the books in one system, and so do we: your people and gifts go to Donor Management and your transactions to Financial Management, with your website, events, auctions, board, volunteers, compliance calendar and grants alongside them.
Everything below uses exports you already have the right to run. Nothing needs an API key, a connection, or help from MonkeyPod; MonkeyPod’s help center says you can export your data yourself at any time at no cost.
Step 1. Relationships and gifts
Run the exports
- People and organizations: open Relationships, then Reports, then Export All Relationships, and choose the details to include: the relationship ID if it is offered, First Name, Last Name, Organization Name, Email, Phone and the address. MonkeyPod emails you the file. To export only some relationships, use Relationships, New Search, View Matching Relationships, then Export Details.
- Gifts: open Reports, then Fundraising & Sales, then Contribution Details. Set the Time Span to cover all your history, use Show / Hide Columns to add the donor’s ID and Email from the relationship details, and click Export. Finance, Search Transactions, filtered to donations, then Export Details works too.
Bring them in
- In Donor Management, open “Import from another CRM” and pick “MonkeyPod”. Upload the relationships export as the donor file and the gift export as the gift file.
- On the mapping screen, map the donor’s ID in the gift file to Linked donor ID. If your gift file has the donor’s email but no ID, map it to Donor email instead: each gift then attaches to the person with the same email in the people file.
- Organizations you keep as partners rather than donors (businesses, foundations, churches) can also go into the Contact Manager with “Import contacts (CSV)”. It recognizes headers such as Name, Organization or Company, Contact Person, Email, Phone, Type, Notes, Address, City, State, ZIP, Website and Tags, and matches rows to existing contacts by email.
Step 2. Your transactions
Run the export
- Open Finance, then Search Transactions.
- Set the date range, choose the columns to show (date, amount, transaction type, account, class, relationship and memo), and click Export Details. The file arrives by email.
Bring it in
In Financial Management, open Transactions and use the “Import from CSV” card, then click “Import transactions”. Before you upload, rename the headers in a spreadsheet:
| Header | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Date | Required. The transaction date. |
| Amount | Required. The dollar amount. |
| Type | Write income or expense on every row. Without it, a positive amount counts as income and a negative one as expense. |
| Category | Your MonkeyPod income or expense account name works here (a column named Account is read the same way). |
| Description | Optional. The memo. |
| Paid to | Optional, for expenses. A column named Vendor or Payee is read the same way, and it feeds the year-end Form 1099 report. |
| Fund | Optional. Restricted, Unrestricted, or the name of a fund. |
Import each period once. A CSV imported twice is added twice, and one import takes up to 2,000 rows, so split a large year into months. For the current year, “Import from your bank” on the same page reads your bank’s QFX, QBO or OFX download, skips lines it has already seen, and matches a bank line to a CSV entry with the same date and amount instead of adding it again.
Step 3. Your email list
Run the export
- Open Email Outreach, then Email Lists.
- Click the list’s name, then Export Subscribers.
Bring only people who are still subscribed. Someone who unsubscribed asked you to stop, and US anti-spam law requires you to honor that on every list you send from, including a new one.
Bring it in
In Newsletters, open Members and use “Paste a list”. Put the name and email side by side in a spreadsheet, copy the two columns, paste them in so each line reads “Name, email”, and click “Add these members”. Emails already on your list are skipped.
What lands where
| Your MonkeyPod export | Where it goes | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Relationships, Export All Relationships | Donor Management, “Import from another CRM”, “MonkeyPod” | Your people and organizations as donor records. |
| Contribution Details (or Search Transactions, donations) | Donor Management, the same wizard | Giving history linked to each person by ID or by email. |
| Search Transactions, everything else | Financial Management, Transactions, “Import from CSV” | Income and expenses by category, fund and payee, rolling up to your budget. |
| Email Lists, Export Subscribers | Newsletters, Members, “Paste a list” | The email list your newsletters go to. |
What stays behind
- Recurring donations. Card details cannot move between payment systems, and MonkeyPod’s own guidance is to ask recurring donors to sign up again. Send them your new giving page, then end the old schedules.
- Documents attached to transactions, such as receipts, bills and invoices.
- Interactions and notes. The interaction feed exports as a spreadsheet; keep it for reference.
- Email campaign history and the audit log.
- Journal entries, account balances and the chart of accounts (see Step 2).
- Automations and add-on apps. Most of what they did for a nonprofit (thank-you letters, receipts, reminders, board and volunteer tracking) is already built into the apps above.
Start with a small batch
In Donor Management and the Contact Manager, records are matched by ID or email address, so running an import again updates the people already there. Bring a small test batch first, check it, then bring the rest. A Donor Management import can be undone from its batch list.
Cost
Ours is public on the pricing page: two plans for the whole organization, no per-app charges, and no fee on the donations, dues or event payments you collect.
Try it with your own export first
Run the relationships export, upload it, and look at the mapping screen before you commit to anything.
See pricing Open the demo