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Overview

Purpose#

The export service allows for the retrieval of transactional data for a given window of time, up to the last 32 days. Transactions are generated whenever a supporter engages with items in your account, such as opens an email, makes a donation to a cause, or signs a petition etc. It is intended as a means to synchronise supporter activity taking place in Engaging Networks with a CRM.

Data availability#

Data is staged to be delivered via dedicated export tables, which are generated daily based for any supporter activity taking place that day. This means that you are not accessing live data from your account with this service. To ensure that you get the most complete dataset, you should always ensure that you are grabbing yesterday's data, as today's data may not be fully available.

Customization

The types of data available to the export service is determined by settings in the dashboard. Individual transaction types can be enabled or disabled, data columns can be enabled, disabled or renamed, dashboard names of account elements may be overridden etc. Check your API Options and settings if you are not seeing data the way you are expecting. The delimiter for any CSV format files can also be modified using these options.

How it works#

The transactional data provided by our export service is delivered in a standardised 'flat' format, meaning that the data is presented as a somewhat two dimensional structure of 'rows' and 'columns'. This way of organising the output has it's origins in the need to provide a balanced approach that can accomodate different kinds of users. It allows users to be able to easily manipulate data using common tools they have available, such as spreadsheet software or basic scripting, but also allows data to be easily extracted programmatically.

The fileformats typically favoured are various types of CSV (Comma Separated Values) files, which can be customised to suit the user, however XML formats are also available.

An introduction to the organisation of a the expected output in a CSV file can be found here.