Recommendations for where data can be captured on RE

azarah minihan

Our organisation is using raiser's edge to record the educational and employment details of our alumni, for example in the educational relationship we have campus, course coude, programme name, class of, faculty etc I am wondering how other users are recording individuals's employment and educational details in Raiser's edge. What data you record in those screens and how it is organised?

Zane Magnuson 2

For employment, your best bet would be to set up Relationships between the Organization and the employed Individuals. Within the Relationship, fill out as much information as possible such as Position, whether or not they're a contact, and what type of contact they should be. For us, if someone is a general go-to person for a company, we list them as the primary contact. We also use "contact type" for different circumstances, such as corporate giving contacts, facility rental contacts, sponsorship contacts, etc.


Whatever system you use, just make sure it's consistent and thorough. The worst thing is to have a question a year or two down the road and realize "Oh, we could answer that but we never bothered tracking that" or "It's not worth trying to answer because the records are so messy".

Alan French

We also use organisation relationships to store our alumni employment information; most are non-constituent relationships, as there's little value to us in creating a constituent record for every company who employs one alumnus.


I often get requests along the lines of "can we have a list of alumni who work in [industry]", which I struggle with because our industry and profession code tables are such a mess (not got around to cleaning them up much since we moved to RE, and prior to that it was a free-for-all). We have about 6 different options just for actuaries! I'd emphasise limiting people's access to be able to add new code table entries, otherwise you'll end up in the same position.