Importing data from a third party is always going to have some hurdles to get over. Not usually technical in nature, we have standard imports, data loader and other tools which all work.
The main problem is data cleanliness, you have no control over what a donor or fundraiser registers with on whatever the donation site is you use. In reality, unless you need to do some clever mapping, it's the supporter/contact data that's likely to need some tidying with the address formats, phone numbers etc.. Most of the donation data is likely data that can come right in once the contact exists.
The traditional export and import process for supporters/contacts gives you an opportunity to clean the data in between the export and import. You can apply standard formats, standard naming, insert record id's for affiliations etc.. BUT it's all manual.
API tools or bespoke code can do the data transfer in the background, but the data doesn't have that opportunity to be cleaned. So you can bring it into Salesforce, give it a status "To be cleaned" and updated it in Salesforce, the only issue for me is the speed at which you can update potentially 100s of imported contacts.
I'm curious how others deal with this, are you exporting, cleaning then importing manually or are you using a tool and cleaning up in Salesforce afterwards? If the latter, how are you simplifying the data clean process and making it as easy as possible?
Cheers!
We do a fair amount of importing from third-party sources and found the need to do both - unfortunately. I prioritize things like name so any email messages have correct names and work on things like address updates once in Salesforce. If address info isn't "clean" typically a mail house would be able to update (e.g.) Avenue to Ave.
