eTapestry to RENXT Conversion - what you wish you'd known!

Beth Gallagher

Hello! We are beginning the conversion process from eTapestry to RENXT and I would love to know any/all the things you wish you'd known before you converted. Anything I can do in advance to help my future self? Thanks in advance for any guidance!

Miki Martin

@Beth Gallagher welcome to Community! So I was not part of the actual conversion from eTap to NXT at my last org but I came in right after they had fully converted. They had SO MANY attributes. They wanted to keep everything from eTap, which is great, but they were not necessarily sure how they wanted to keep it or use it in the future. So much of it was duplicated, though, in constituent codes and sometimes even in the attributes (org is an all girls' high school so we had Alumnae as a constituent code plus an Affiliation of the same; athletics was tracked in two different ways for sports participation). I would really review the data you have now in eTap; clean up whatever you can. If you are making an affiliation a constituent code, you don't need to also keep it as an attribute.

I would also check all your contact information. I was still cleaning up constituent records four years later that had the same address, email address and/or phone number listed two to four times with different types. Trust your data. If you have someone marked as deceased, you don't need to create a solicit code called Deceased, nor do you need to add additional solicit codes to the record or put “Deceased” in the first line of the address.

You can never fully plan on how you will use data in the future. However, if you can feel confident that your data is clean when it's transferred and you have set policies in place then you should be on a strong foundation. Just be sure you can map every piece of data to a new field that makes sense to others; don't try and fit something somewhere it doesn't go. If you need to create attributes that's fine but build tables of the options; don't let them be freeform. That will reduce keystroke errors. I'm sure others with experience in both will have some better suggestions.

Good luck!

Beth Gallagher

@Miki Martin Thank you! Yes, I spent years cleaning up a conversion but this will be my first time on this side of things.

Christine Robertson

@Beth Gallagher Let's talk.

Christine Robertson

@Beth Gallagher eTapestry is structured very differently than RE. This is especially important in thinking through the migration because of how it affects personas (think addressees/salutations, addresses, phone numbers/email addresses, etc.). You will absolutely want to get eTap as clean as possible on the front end, but you will still have cleanup to do when the conversion is over.

Kelly Bodie

@Beth Gallagher Hello! I did an eTap to RE/NXT conversion in 2019. I'm so very glad I did! Overall, you can feel good about this move even though change is hard.

After the fact, I handled an import of membership history from custom eTap fields into the RE membership table. I wish I had pinpointed that one for help during the main conversion. It was a little clumsy to do it with the import tool.

Importing into RE (like from a future spreadsheet) is fairly difficult, and there's not incentive to make it better. If you're not already thinking about something like Omatic, I'd suggest it. (more $ I know, but it's so smart).

good luck!

Beth Gallagher

@Kelly Bodie Thank you! Yes, I have about 5 years of experience in RENXT and just recently started here with eTapestry. I never used Omatic but did use Importacular.