Importing Student Data from another SIS into Blackbaud

Bonnie Moore

For the 2023-2024 school year, our Admissions Dept. decided to use FACTS Admissions for enrollment management. I will need to import this data into Blackbaud K-12 but have no idea how to accomplish this. Chat support could find a way to import student data all at once and recommended I place my question on this discussion board.

I am very familiar with importing data into Blackbaud via CORE>Import, however it seems to only be specific fields that can be imported at once, not the entire student admissions record.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Bonnie Moore

John Ronan

@Bonnie Moore, I'm a bit curious to know why your admissions folk chose to not use BB Enrollment Management, which is so tightly integrated….

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I'm no expert, but given your circumstances, it seems to me that import is the [only/best] way to go.

Below are my initial thoughts:

You'd probably need to traverse through the different import types to ensure you're covering everything.

e.g. Sequencing through the following Import categories and types [I'll write <category>\\<type> below].

Note: it's probably very important that you assign a unique host id to every individual you import. It'll make reference these individuals for subsequent imports much easier.

• Start with category Contact Card-Import/Refresh:
  • General User for both candidates and students.
    • It occurs to me that you might want to encode some smarts into your host ids. e.g. for a student whose host id is “1234”, you might want to code the parents as “1234_p1” and "1234_p2". This way, as you're going through the various imports, you'll always be able to
  • Import type Relationship Building to link the parents to their child
  • Then Candidate Role Assignment
  • Then Household [maybe]
• Admissions
  This is a maybe. You could go straight to the student level, but if there is any chance that you will use BB Enrollment Management in the future, you will probably want all of your students to have been candidates before students.
  • Decisions
  • Financial Aid
  • Test Scores

If you want more ideas/info re managing host ids, let me know. We have a rigorous scheme for storing host ids that ensures uniqueness and are using them more and more.