Converting graduates to alumni

Jolynn Uyehara

We are on 2 different systems at our school so I am wondering if anyone else can relate and how do you handle this?

Our department is now using RaiserEdgeNXT. The rest of our school is still using Senior Systems. What is the best way to go about importing the recent graduates from Senior Systems to new constituents as alumni in RENXT? Thank you.

Karen Diener

I would recommend looking in to Importacular and ImportOmatic products. The native RE import tool doesn't work as nicely as those two, primarily because you cannot make in-time decisions about potential duplicate records or make updates to data.


If you don't expect any current students to have records in RE, you probably could use RE's native import tool since you won't need to address potential duplicates or data updates. If you intend to create relationships to their parents - who presumably are in RE already - it will be difficult to do with RE's import tool.


Karen

Dariel Dixon

The way you would have to do this is with an import. If you get an import file from Senior Systems that you can view and manipulate (.csv is pretty universal), it will help you to determine how to set up your import. Karen Diener‍ recommends Importacular or ImportOmatic, but they may not necessarily be needed and can be cost prohibitive. It can be done with the native tool after getting the import set the first time. Relationships can be difficult to manage, if you have current parent data or current student data. I would suggest trying to set up the import using the native tool to determine if the other import tools are worth the investment.


Also, it's worth thinking about how many graduates you will be moving over. Regardless of how you import the data, you may still have to make some changes manually.

Jenny Marquardt

I also have used ImportOmatic and it works like a charm. I have used it in many other types of imports as well. For us it was worth the money. I have also done it the RE way which definetley works but very time consuming as there was/is a ton of information to add

Tom Klimchak

Yep, like the others we do the same thing: use a third party import tool (Import-O-Matic). When we first converted to Raiser's Edge we tried to use the native Import tool for data coming over from the Datatel/SunGard/Colleague/Ellucian system. It works, but it took a lot of fiddling and prep work and then even more clean-up after the fact.


A tool like ImportOMatic takes a bit to set up, but once it is the software can do a fair bit of data cleanup as part of the import process which saves a ton of time and energy with each import.

Amanda Campbell

Hi Karen,

Have you used both Importacular and Importomatic? I am wondering which one is better?

thanks

Amanda