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ImportOmatic - Efficiency Metrics

Cindy McAdam

Does anyone who uses ImportOmatic to import/export between RE.NXT and other platforms have any time-saving or cost-saving metrics they can share with me so I can build a business case to present to our financial decision makers? If possible, can you include numbers (time and $) and percentages, and the size of your department? Also, what is the time commitment in the initial setup per platform that needs mapping? We are an independent high school with an Advancement department of 3 with the hopes to grow to 8. We have only 2 admins (one focused on events/gift entry & acknowledgment; one focused on all data import/export, mining, integrity, and rollovers). We have the following non-BB platforms (most have been brought on in the last 12 months: (so are still working on integrations)

Enrollment
- bringing over application data for new students/families
Current Student platform
- bringing over updates to constituent contact information throughout the year
Social Fundraising
- gift entry, online donations, and social networking campaigns
Alumni networking
- Updates to constituent contact info, willingness to volunteer, college info, current business info
Wealth Management
- exporting from RE constituents to screen; importing wealth info
Event registration/Website forms
- importing registration, payment, notes captured, alumni notes/updates

Thank you for your help and any other words of wisdom as we consider ImportOmatic.

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Comments

Whitney Shelton

@Cindy McAdam
This is a great question and one that I wish I had looked into more before making a decision on a platform.

We use OneCause and while I love it, we have to use importacular to import into RE. From what I understand, ImportOmatic is much better and easier to use.

I recently had a call with Classy and I was super impressed with their platform and pitch. They use importacular and do the same things that OneCause can do.

If I was able to choose, I would get a platform that does all you need it to do but that also uses importacular.

Lorrie Parent

@Cindy McAdam
We use Omatic to import membership transactions and the efficiency it provides is constituent and membership imports can be done in one pass. An RE process would require a constituent import then a membership import.

I'd suggest seeing if any of your imports involve a similar improvement. Does the RE option require multiple passes?

Catherine Burns

@Cindy McAdam Great questions, but not information I collected when I implemented ImportOmatic. But ImportOmatic does so much more than the standard RE import and saves time preparing the import files - the dictionaries clean errors and translate incoming data to existing values in our tables; creating skip row exceptions can split the data file as you import so if you do need two passes you don't need to separate the file first; the duplicate finder is better than RE dedupe; you can add virtual fields as you import. These are all great time savers.

However, there have been a couple of concerning instances of loss of functionality recently. Blackbaud (hosting) removed the integration of Findomatic (which comes with ImportOmatic) finder number barcode scanning for gift entry, and the ImportOmatic MailChimp Connector no longer works, if you want this you need Omatic Cloud. I suspect Omatic Cloud is getting the bulk of the development now so you may want to look into that as an alternative, especially if you want to use webview more.

Tom Klimchak

@Cindy McAdam Hi… We've had Raiser's Edge for about 12 years and ImportOmatic for 11 of those years… We tried going the first year using RE's import tool. It worked great for simple imports, but once we got into importing alumni, freshmen students and their parents we quickly realized we needed a better solution.

We have about four people in Advancement Services and one IT person assigned to most of our projects.

Setup of ImportOmatic was “easy” in the sense that they helped, but there is a bit of a learning curve to figure out the best way to handle all the data coming in. You need to think about how you want to find duplicates, require manual input, check over certain fields, etc. I think our initial setup probably took a week or two of us playing around with fields, discussing options and formatting our input file before we really got our import working well. It's not difficult, but there are a ton of options and settings and it gets a little overwhelming at times. This is especially true if you only run imports a few times as year as we do.

Our alumni import process used to take about two weeks from start to finish. We now have it down to a bit of a science. Our IT department can produce the alumni file in about 10 minutes. I then check for few new field codes (majors, student clubs, etc) and update our tables. After that I always do a ‘test run" of one record just to make sure I didn’t screw anything up (I usually screw up something).. ahem.. but the actual import of 1,400 alumni only takes about… three hours? Most of that is just confirming address changes and manually choosing whether or not a person is a duplicate or not. We COULD probably speed that up a bit by dialing back some of the sensitivity on address differences, but I don't mind.

Not going to lie: things aren't perfect. After the import the data is there but there are still a few little things we have to manually clean up, so we then spend the next few days going through a query of the imported records and double-checking relationships, primary degrees, cleaning up minor codes, etc. We try to get all alumni into RE and ready for mailing/emailing within 30 days of graduation and we hit that goal pretty consistently.

We easily cut our work time in half, but it's really more than that because the cleanup is just done intermittently afterwards. Some of the biggest time savers for us is simply the ability to replace our academic codes with our OWN codes RE as the import runs. So a code like CLUB-COMS-4333-COMMSERVCLUB comes from our academic system but we put it into RE as [CO]-Community Service Club. We have this set up for hundreds (okay, probably thousands) of codes now.

We haven't done much importing of records other than constituents.

Forgot what other questions you asked (can't move the window, hate this forum software… ahem)… but feel free to drop me a message if you have more questions…

Cindy McAdam

@Tom Klimchak Thank you so much for walking me through this. I've onboarded enough vendors and systems to know that nothing is perfect or without challenges. But this is VERY helpful!

Cindy McAdam

@Catherine Burns that is an interesting perspective that I will be sure to ask my account manager to see what the plans are on the horizon for ImportOmatic vs Omatic Cloud…

Cindy McAdam

@Lorrie Parent yes, I am having to do a bunch of chopped up imports for RE (constituent, relationship, constituent attributes, education attributes, Business). It's tedious.

Cindy McAdam

@Whitney Shelton thank you Whitney!