VSys One: Volunteer Management Software

IFI Person Lookup

For all tasks which are focused around people (Create/update people, Credit volunteers with hours globally, Add/remove people from lists, and others), you have three options:

Include the person’s 16-digit ID code in the Owner field. This will tell IFI to simply use and update that person without any further interaction.
Leave the person’s Owner field blank, enable the "Person lookup" module, and provide some data with which IFI can search for the person. For each record, IFI will show you a list of people who match your criteria, and let you select one of them to be used. If the "People" module is enabled and sufficient data to create a new person is provided, IFI will also let you create a brand-new person here.
Leave the person’s Owner field blank, or fill it with the ID code you want used for a new person, and check the box If a person does not exist, create a new one… in the "Module specific options" dialog. If you do this, IFI will create a new person every time it finds a record which does not refer to a valid person. This is great if you’re importing new people that you know are not already in your data, but dangerous since it can create a lot of duplicate people if they already exist.

If none of these apply, IFI will ignore that record and continue on to the next.

For these people-focused tasks, you should always enable the "Person lookup" module, and provide it as many fields as you have available. The more data you give it, the better a job it will do in finding the person in VSys, and in sorting the most likely prospects to the top.

These are the fields that the person lookup module can use. All of them refer to the current person.

Field	Explanation	Example value
Family name	Last name	`Doe`
First name	Given name	`John`
Full name	Given name and family name	`John M. Doe`
Middle name		`M`
Name backwards	Family and given name, family name first	`Doe, John M`
Gender		`M`
Phone	Any phone number. Any formatting is ignored	`(888) 988-4467`
E-mail	Any standard e-mail address, capitalization is ignored	`support@ bespoke.us`
Age	Age as of the current date	`42`
DOB	Date of birth. For dBase and Excel, enter dates so that the source program understands them; for tab-delimited, use `mm/dd/yyyy` format	`04/27/1970`
Address	First line of any address	`5 Sand Creek Rd`
City	City/town/village for any address	`Albany`
State	State/province for any address	`NY`
Postal code	Zip/postal code for any address	`12205`
Person number	The Person number field on the Additional data panel	`134`
Import reference	For people previously imported from Volunteer Works or other programs, the ID they had in that previous application	`1698`
Type	Existing person type	`Volunteer`

Person lookup module-specific options

Person lookup import reference offset

When data is being imported from multiple databases, e.g. two or more Volgistics systems, the imported ID value for a person such as Kiosk ID would often be duplicated, with people in both systems sharing the same value.

To work around that, put an import reference offset here, e.g. "SOUTH". When looking for a person, and the Import reference ID value is "1234", VSys will instead look for "SOUTH1234".

If a person does not exist...

If this is checked, and an incoming record has enough data to create a person, if IFI cannot find an existing person it will make a new one without first prompting you.