Education relationship attributes

Elizabeth Iannaconi

I am working on doing heavy data clean up for my organization this summer. Attributes and table clean up has been a recurring them so far. One of the issues in particular is trying to figure out a best practice/policy on adding sports as an education relationship attribute on a constituent record. Currently, some records have added an attribute for every year that the student played a particular sport and some records have one attribute for the sport and the years played are in the description. Are there any schools/educational institutions out there that have a recommendation on how to handle sports or other activities as attribute?

JoAnn Strommen

Welcome to the BB Community forums, @Elizabeth Iannaconi.

We record the sport one time as a constituent attribute. (It's what I inherited.) As an educational relationship attribute would certainly work - just a bit more clicks to get to it.

Guessing at the rational used for just list as one time is because athletic department has their own records. From the development side it would not seem to be needed. If development staff is meeting with an athlete alum asking about how many years they played is a good discussion topic.

And we were not probably given the information for each year's participation. Our records come into db upon graduation and going into every record to enter that would be quite cumbersome. If you have ‘student’ records it would be easier to track if given the info by athletics.

Since I've been here it was brought up once by the athletic director, but we determined he had access to the info outside of RE and it was way too much work to enter each year for every athlete in db to be used a couple of times.

Just one user's opinion/experience.

Katherine Mannion

Hi Elizabeth-

In my experience, I've always seen it as a constituent attribute, like JoAnn mentioned. But the relationship attribute works too. I created a category for Extracurricular and then had a dropdown that contained anything a student could have been involved in, sports or otherwise. I never worried about the number of years, either. If I knew the student was a captain, I would put that in comments, but I didn't go out of my way to get that info.

Hope that helps!

Matthew Nareff

When I come up against a question like this I always ask myself what need am I going to have for the data. Do you ever need to pull a list of who played a particular sport in a particular year, or is this something you think you might need in the future? For example, is there a need to know who played soccer in 2022? If that's the case then I would think you'd need it listed each year with dates attached. If you don't need that and you're just more interested in knowing who played soccer because you've got an event to invite students and alumnae to then it really can just be one entry with any additional information (dates, captaincy, etc.) in the comments field. No need for additional data entry if you're not going to use it.

Pamela Bird

You could add it as an Event. One event for each year. All players for a particular year would be in the event.

Miki Martin

I agree with @JoAnn Strommen and @Katherine Mannion. I work at a school and we also have that information as a constituent attribute. We have had the Athletic Director ask us once for a list of alumnae who played certain years but we just explained we could not quite produce that detailed of information, just whether an alumna played a particular sport. I think overall that should be sufficient for an Advancement department. Also, constituent attributes are easily visible in web view, which is what the majority of our users utilize. I am the only one who works frequently in DB view so having the information readily available in web view is much more conducive to our operation.

Jane Coughlin

We bring over all student athletics as an education attribute when they graduate, and it lists the team name and the year. If they were on the Basketball team two years, they would have two Basketball attributes, one for 2020 and one for 2021, for example. We have it under Education because we look at is as part of their educational career and we do the same for student activities. I like that we can see it under the education tile. There are limitations. For example, in webview you see '… and 3 more' for additional team entries and have no way to drill into the 3 more, and you can't create a List from Ed Attributes, which is a major flaw when trying to get fundraisers more self-sufficient. For now I can create a static query using the ed attributes and make it available for use in Lists, but these limits might be reasons for using const. attributes instead. We set this up during our conversion two years ago and I'm not sure we'd change it now.

Lara Couture

@Elizabeth Iannaconi
We record it on the education record. We wanted to keep all the student involvement (student orgs, sports, accomplishments, etc.) with the education record. Anything they do as alumni (committee involvement, etc) is recorded as a constituent attribute. We receive the student involvement information from the registrar so how athletics is recorded has changed over the years. Now it seems to be a separate row for each season they participate.

Keleigh Allen

@Elizabeth Iannaconi
We record it as a constituent attribute, with a separate record for each year. The reason for this is that education attributes do not fully appear in Raiser's Edge NXT web view. Sometimes it shows it and sometimes it shows one or two attributes, and then a note that says “and more” with no way to see what the “and more” is without going to database view. Since this can be important information for end users to see and the majority of them only use web view we chose to use constituent attributes for now. I have frequently gotten requests for players within a date range or for a particular year, so that is why we do a separate record for each year.

Chris Snow

@JoAnn Strommen
What is the easiest way to get this into the system?

JoAnn Strommen

@Chris Snow

How you can input the data depends on what data you have.

In your athletic data file do you by any chance have their RE ID or a student ID that you have in your system. If you have that, you can create a query of the records you want to add the data to and possibly do a global add. You would need to do a query for each different data.

Do you have ImportOMatic or Importacular? Those platforms can match by the name of the individual.

If I know I'm going to have to look up each name/record, I would consider doing a constituent query (Criteria: Specific Record one of… ) to group them in a query and then do the global add. IMO easier than opening each record to add it one by one. I just did this for small list of event registrants.