When data arrives from your fundraising platform — whether it is a donation, a fundraising page registration, a team creation, or a recurring donation — MoveData processes it through the donation pipeline. This article explains what records are created, the order they are processed, and what you can expect to see in your Salesforce org.

The donation pipeline#

MoveData processes every notification through five phases, always in the same order. Each phase finds or creates a single Salesforce record before moving to the next.

1. Account — find or create the organisation account (if applicable). For individual supporters, the account is handled by Salesforce (NPSP creates the household account automatically; Nonprofit Cloud uses a person account).
2. Contact — find or create the supporter's contact record. This may be the donor, the fundraiser, or another supporter depending on the notification type.
3. Campaign — find or create the campaign. This may be the campaign a donation belongs to, or the campaign a fundraiser is raising money for.
4. Recurring — if the notification relates to a recurring gift, find or create the recurring donation (NPSP) or gift commitment schedule (Nonprofit Cloud).
5. Donation — create the donation record itself: an opportunity (NPSP) or gift transaction (Nonprofit Cloud).

At each phase, MoveData checks whether the record already exists using platform keys and your Salesforce duplicate rules. If it finds a match, it updates the existing record rather than creating a duplicate. For more on how duplicate matching works, see Duplicate rules.

What MoveData creates in Salesforce#

The exact records depend on whether you use NPSP or Nonprofit Cloud (NPC).

Post-processing#

After MoveData creates the core records, a post-processing step handles additional records. These include:

• Soft credits — contact roles or credit records for fundraisers and campaign organisers. See How soft credits work for details.
• Campaign members — linking the supporter to the campaign with the appropriate status.
• Matching gifts — if the platform supports corporate matching, MoveData creates the matching gift record.

Key system fields#

MoveData stamps every record it creates with tracking fields so you can trace data back to the source.

Related articles#

• How soft credits work
• Campaign attribution
• Recurring donations
• How commerce and tickets are processed
• Understanding notifications
• Viewing execution logs
• Duplicate rules
• Reading and understanding error messages