Consultant recommendations for University dbase to NXT

Laurie Larsen

Hello – Approximately 8 months ago we moved from RE to RE NXT. We had an IT staff person who was working on having the college's parent and student data in Colleague/Ellucian automated to rollover to RE NXT. This person is no longer at our organization, and our department (Alumni/Philanthropy) have been asked to look into consultants that could help set up this programming. Does anyone have any consultants recommendations? I know we could do some importing ourselves with O-matics, etc. but feel that would be a step backwards. It was very nice to have dynamic rollover of info when we were on RE7 and that was what the IT person was in the process of working on for RE NXT (apparently that set up wouldn't work on the NXT version) Thank you!

Spring Velazquez

@Laurie Larsen I don't have any specific recommendations, but this Thursday Prenger Solutions Group is hosting a webinar that is set to provide valuable tips when hiring a nonprofit consultant. If you're in the early stages of hiring one, this might be worthwhile for you: Hiring a Fundraising or Database Consultant

Christine Robertson

@Laurie Larsen I know that there are people doing some of this in SKY API and with Power Automate, but if you are going to go that route, I think you will either need to prepare to keep a consultant on retainer indefinitely or commit to someone at your organization learning that process. If you're not prepared to do that, then I would take a look at Omatic Cloud to see if that would provide more of the automation you need with less of a learning curve.

Lucy Ruiz

@Laurie Larsen - as Christine indicated SKY API could automate the process. However, by using the SKY API you are connecting to NXT fields only. If your organization is using fields not currently available via SKY API you may have to rely on a combination of integration and standard importing. Currently the following fields are not available using SKY API – school name, campus, GPA, known name and frat/sorority. If your organization has re-named these fields and other data exists in these fields of course you cannot import. Our team has built integration points between the systems. Happy to speak to you and determine your requirements.

Stu Manewith

@Christine Robertson thanks so much for recommending Omatic. @Laurie Larsen we at Omatic routinely integrate data from Ellucian systems into RE NXT; we also send data from RE NXT back to Ellucian financial systems for posting. We'd be delighted to help.

Alexandra Ortiz

@Laurie Larsen Outlier Data Consulting is a small consulting firm with dynamic co-founders. We both have backgrounds in Higher Ed and NXT implementation. We may be able to help! Let me know if you would like more information.