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Best Practice for Updating Students/Families Each SY

Audrey Morris

Hi, I stepped into the data management role for our Development team a couple of years ago. We are a K-8 School that was once a K-12. At the time, the people who had been running our RE database did not understand data, the database, or how much cleaning it matters. They had been running REConnect daily to import data from Blackbaud Education Management (MySchoolApp) into RE, which created a lot of issues that I've now spent years cleaning up (quadruplicates, quintuplets and more of constituents; convoluted relationships - at some point someone made all spouses “ex” and added the same spouse back as a spouse but didn't check the spousal relationship box and reset all HoH designations, just as an example…. it was a hot mess). To remove one of the variables (and since RE couldn't offer a functional REConnect product that handles apostrophes and multiple generations of the same name!) I discontinued the department using REConnect. Since I took over I've been manually importing new families each year, and manually updating graduates to Alumni/former students to former constituent codes and adding education data, as we don't have more than 150 or so per year that need adjustment. Now that I have things in RE cleaner, I'd like to see if there is a better way to do this data movement from BEM to RE.

Does anyone else have a better process than a regular semi-annual import? How do you check for/upload your regular profile changes throughout the year from BEM to RE (something I am also currently doing manually)? I am especially curious how you handle Relationship connections. I have added our BEM User ID as the former SSN field, so there is at least a way to match existing BEM constituents to existing RE constituents, but I would like to be able to add the constituent relationships to RE as well, and every solution I've found to that process is daunting.

Any help you could offer (on however you're moving constituent updates/additions/relationship data from BEM to RE as a school!) would be so appreciated. Thank you!

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Comments

Christine Robertson

@Audrey Morris Outside of BB options, there are several third-party import tools that can really help with this process. I'm most familiar with Importacular from Zeidman Development (@Kimberly Lankshear) and Importomatic from Omatic (@Stu Manewith). I've also heard good things about SmartTHING (@Warren Sherliker). These tools offer a lot more matching functionality than you can find in the native RE import tool. Happy to answer any questions that I can!

Audrey Morris

@Christine Robertson Thank you for your reply! I actually have a call set up with IOM next week, but I have a feeling all of these are going to be cost-prohibitive. I literally have a $0 budget for data management or augmentation - had to beg for Double the Donation and it's paid for itself 6 times over. Unfortunately I'm still working on teaching the value of clean data to some!

Hoping someone here can tell me their process (like first I do X, then I do Y, then I do Z) that anyone is using if they're not able to spend thousands per year on a third party program.

Thanks!

Christine Robertson

@Audrey Morris Importacular has a free version that will help with constituents. To add Relationships (such as Individual or Education), there are costs, but I definitely think that the free version could be valuable in the meantime.

Audrey Morris

@Christine Robertson oh good to know! Thanks! I sent them a message requesting more info on Relationship pricing as well.

SmartTHING Developers

@Christine Robertson Thanks for the mention - yes we have the SmartSYNC platform which has over 50 pre-built connectors for apps and includes the SmartIMPORT app which is the equivalent of importomatic and importacular but built for NXT (and obviously we would say, with a few nice features). Contact the team if you would like a demo or to discuss anything further support at smartthing.org

Lauren Henderson

@Audrey Morris could you work with whoever is in charge of Education Management to standardize data in that system? If so, it will definitely make things easier. I admit that ConnectRE is far from perfect, but if run regularly with an eye to checking changes made it is still a valuable tool. What is your student population? Do you often have address/contact info changes mid-year? Does primary communication to parents for your school go out through Education Management, or RE, or some other way?

Karen Diener

@Audrey Morris I also had to turn off ConnectRE due to many of the same problems. We actually never had it running - I had to make the decision to NOT sync. So that you know the scale, this was in a high school with 2000 students, and each parent had their own record.

A lot of this was due to the Registrar who would not let me touch current student and current parent data. They were all in RE but were imported (by me) using the native import functionality. Once they were RE, the registrar sent me all updates that I did manually. If we sent a piece of mail from Development and it was returned, I would always share that information with him and allow him to make the determination if it should be changed.

It really changed the way I managed our data, but I worked for a school first and foremost, so it made sense to carefully manage the current parent / student data. Once a student graduated, I had complete control of what happened to their records. One thing that helped tie the two systems together was that I added the student ID in their social security number field. This provided a field to connect the two data sets together and allowed me to easily look up and import students.

After I left, my replacement was less adept at imports and the organization purchased ImportOmatic. I know you said you have no budget, and I've been there!

Christine Cooke

@Audrey Morris

This is always a challenge. And for a monster company that has all the toys, some of them are just trouble. I prefer to get the new families (parents, students, other relations) in clean and not the other method of importing and then having to go back in and review/screen every record for cleanup and linking relations.

Actually I review ahead of time and separate the “it's an additional family member” for brand new not in RE at all folks into two groups and then work on getting them in. That way you can import the new folks and their relations, which requires less finessing - whereas those that already have a tie in RE I prefer to manually enter and link etc.

I feel your pain, I worked at a high school that had approximately 300 new students a year and I manually entered each student and each parent/stepparent/guardian and linked up everyone, so 900+ records. There was a large portion of them that had history in RE through family relations, parents that were alums etc.

Audrey Morris

@Lauren Henderson Hi Lauren, thanks for the reply! I am actually able to manage BEM data as well as RE data, but work closely with our IT on the BEM data as well. Our addresses/CCodes/etc. are synched up between the two but our parents are able to get in twice per year (before school starts and at contract time) and update their info without going through our Exec. Assistant for that update, which means we do end up with non-standard addresses from time to time. Our EA is monitoring those and correcting them, although no process is 100% accurate she is able to catch most of them quickly. I do clean the data after I pull it and before I put in RE, updating both BEM and the XLS pull when I find something that needs changing. Our school population is about 800 and each parent and each student (and candidate) has their own constituent record in BEM. This was carried through to RE until 4 years ago, which students were held out of RE in order to clean up the mess. I have not added them back in yet, but intend on doing so, so that both systems match. Our primary means of communication between school/parents is through BEM, but school/donors is through me/RE/NXT.

Audrey Morris

@Karen Diener thank you so much for your reply, you totally validated my current process!! I actually added User ID to the SSN field for all of our RE records where I could find an existing BEM match, and that has absolutely helped with deduping and updating data. Our registrar duties were just moved from our sweet but computer challenged registrar to our IT department, which I already work closely with on data. Essentially it sounds like we're doing the same thing you were. Thanks for the support and making me feel like at least I'm not doing this completely wrong for our current budget restrictions!

Audrey Morris

@Christine Cooke bCREPro Thanks for the reply, I have been separating those “new to RE" people from updates when I import, which does cut down on how overwhelming it feels. I also review data before importing it vs. having to do cleanup… I try to use cleanup afterwards as a last resort! Thanks for the info on how you're doing relationships. It seems like there has to be a better way to do this that isn't manual, but it looks like if you don't have deep pockets the answer is NOPE!

Christine Cooke

@Audrey Morris
somehow you have got to get buy in from leads/director that clean data is a must and that constantly cleaning during every project is a waste of time, open to errors and definitely not efficient. Working smarter not harder - which is what you are trying to do. So they need to buy in and give you some traction on investing on importomatic or something to aid in the multi-layered imports required to get the relationships entered in the correct way with the linkages and all.