Accessing and understanding your Impact Stack data

Impact Stack securely stores the data submitted through your webforms.

Impact Stack holds the following data:

• Supporter records with predefined fields such as first name, last name, email and postal address, and various person-related data. The contact records also holds the Impact Stack tags, which show which forms the person has completed.
• Activity time stamp with the type of action, like “donation”, and a reference to the complete form data for this person.
• Webform data which contains the data people put in the form and some tracking data.
• Payment made on a Impact Stack form.
• Opt-ins and opt-outs on the newsletter subscription, phone opt-in and post opt-in fields.
• LogCRM events, which are small "real-time" data packages that contain all form submissions and contact changes. They essentially include all data Impact Stack collects about a user.

You can access your Impact Stack data directly in two ways.

From within Impact Stack itself

As a logged-in user you can access:

• Webform data - Click on 'Results' while viewing any node to view or download a copy of all data submitted to that node.
• Supporter data - Click on 'Supporters > Supporter management' to view, filter and download supporter records.

CSV exports on Impact Stack Files (Nextcloud)

We also store a copy of your data securely as pre-compiled CSV export files which you can access at any time without needing to query the database.

When you log into your Impact Stack files, https://files.impact-stack.org, you'll find two folders:

• exports: This holds the exported data in CSV format, separated in several folders.
• support: You can use this folder to share files or passwords securely.

These annotated spreadsheets will help explain in detail what's there:

The exports folder holds these subfolders:

• actions: Files combining all fields of all actions into one file, so you don't have to download the webform results from every individual action. The file will contain a column for every field which has received a submission during the month, so bear in mind that the number and order of columns will vary month to month. Column titles will remain the same, so any import scripts should use column titles rather than relying on column order, which is subject to change.
• activities: Records of all supporter activity, such as (un-)subscriptions to an email list, payments and donations, form submissions, the creation or update of a contact record, etc.
• contacts: all supporter contacts with all their fields, tags and creation dates. Contrary to all other subfolder, there is only one file here, that gets updated daily.
• donations: all payments made on an Impact Stack form, including the data submitted on all fields present on the payment form.
• opt-ins: all supporter email newsletter, phone or postal opt-ins.
• opt-outs: all supporter email newsletter, phone or postal opt-outs.
• target-messages: Submission data from actions which are "Email to target" or "Match to Target" content types. Includes supporter email address, first name, last name and postcode plus target and message data. If a message was sent to multiple targets, there is a separate line for each message.
• targets: Shows the target data and the number of messages sent to each target per "Email to target" or "Match to Target" action. This only includes targets who have received at least one message. 

Except for the contacts and targets files, all files only contain the data for one month. The file for the current month is updated daily, usually during the night.

Read more about how to get your Impact Stack data into other systems.