Importing Education Info

Andrea Grigg

Many people are sharing their import tricks this month, and with this focus, I wanted to crowdsource opinions, resources, and tips on importing Education.


Storing class level and term at our school is crucial information for alumni relations, but it has never been added to Raiser's Edge. We have a re-enrollment process at the school each year, so the basic enrollment information (status date, school) refreshes in RE through integration with EE. I think the best solution may be to structure an import with the start of each term with the Enrollment information into the Education Relationships. We would likely need to have an education relationship entry for each year of enrollment, because of our unique yearly structure and to avoid any integration overwriting


Has anyone imported Education information? How did you stucture it? Do you have a set procedure manual you could share?


Has anyone found a way to overcome the overwriting challenges presented by EE/RE integration without spending the thousands needed for the Alumni module?

Kim Gifford

Andrea Humenick:

Many people are sharing their import tricks this month, and with this focus, I wanted to crowdsource opinions, resources, and tips on importing Education.


Storing class level and term at our school is crucial information for alumni relations, but it has never been added to Raiser's Edge. We have a re-enrollment process at the school each year, so the basic enrollment information (status date, school) refreshes in RE through integration with EE. I think the best solution may be to structure an import with the start of each term with the Enrollment information into the Education Relationships. We would likely need to have an education relationship entry for each year of enrollment, because of our unique yearly structure and to avoid any integration overwriting


Has anyone imported Education information? How did you stucture it? Do you have a set procedure manual you could share?


Has anyone found a way to overcome the overwriting challenges presented by EE/RE integration without spending the thousands needed for the Alumni module?

We import all alumni information, inclduing class year, graduation year, major and major comments through an import from our SIS system, Banner. By doing this, we capture all relevant information we need.  I have created an excel sheet of the headers that we import and would be happy to share, if you would like.

Gina Smith 2

We set up Education Attributes for Grade Level and Homeroom Teacher for each academic year and import them into RE.  My attributes look like this on a student's primary alumni educaton record.



I import the Grade Level in late July and the Homerooms in early August, once school is actually started.  

The comments field is their "division" since we have several schools in our system that we like to be able to track, analyze - but no field is availabe in the educaton record.  In the above example, this student is in the Middle School (MS).  We have 5 locations/schools we use and track those in the comments line for the current year attribute.


We mark our school as the primary alumni eductaon for all current students (and alumni, too), and track class of, status, date entered/left thru integration/sync.


I created a procedure document with some detailed instruction, and would be happy to share.

Lauren Schler CFRE bCREPro

Thank you Kim, can you please share your Excel file with me? My
email address is lauren@staupell.com.

 

Thanks,

 

Lauren

 

Gina Smith 2

Andrea Humenick:

Many people are sharing their import tricks this month, and with this focus, I wanted to crowdsource opinions, resources, and tips on importing Education.


Storing class level and term at our school is crucial information for alumni relations, but it has never been added to Raiser's Edge. We have a re-enrollment process at the school each year, so the basic enrollment information (status date, school) refreshes in RE through integration with EE. I think the best solution may be to structure an import with the start of each term with the Enrollment information into the Education Relationships. We would likely need to have an education relationship entry for each year of enrollment, because of our unique yearly structure and to avoid any integration overwriting


Has anyone imported Education information? How did you stucture it? Do you have a set procedure manual you could share?


Has anyone found a way to overcome the overwriting challenges presented by EE/RE integration without spending the thousands needed for the Alumni module?

Sorry - replied to the wrong post below... Here is my reply in the right place



We set up Education Attributes for Grade Level and Homeroom Teacher for each academic year and import them into RE.  My attributes look like this on a student's primary alumni educaton record.




I import the Grade Level in late July and the Homerooms in early August, once school is actually started.  

The comments field is their "division" since we have several schools in our system that we like to be able to track, analyze - but no field is availabe in the educaton record.  In the above example, this student is in the Middle School (MS).  We have 5 locations/schools we use and track those in the comments line for the current year attribute.


We mark our school as the primary alumni eductaon for all current students (and alumni, too), and track class of, status, date entered/left thru integration/sync.


I created a procedure document with some detailed instruction, and would be happy to share.

Kim Gifford

Lauren Schler, CFRE, bCRE-Pro:

Thank you Kim, can you please share your Excel file with me? My email address is lauren@staupell.com.

 

Thanks,

 

Lauren

 

 

 

Hi Lauren.

I sent you the excel sheet I use.  Please let me know if you have ANY questions and I would be happy to help!

Kim

Andrea Grigg

Gina Smith:

I've been debating using Attributes to store education information as well, mostly because it will allow filters in reports and exports to be segmented so easily. This option is super appealing. Gina, I think both our schools have a similar structure with different divisions. I am debating putting the Division as a drop-down in the Description and the Year in the Comments field. Did you ever do testing on a different set up of your data in attributes.


I am also extremely hestitant to move forward storing this info in attributes because it feels inherantly wrong when there is an Education section in RE. I would be curious to know if there a reason why your organization started some Education info outside of the Education Relationship record area! 

Gina Smith 2

Andrea,

We did at one time have an attribute "Grade Level" with the description as the grade level and year in comments.  I made the change to keep a separate attribute for each year a few years ago - although I can't exactly remember why at the moment.  I think it had something to do with pulling the data into some reports that made it easier to pull straight from the attribute rather than comments.  But, honestly, I can't remember.  We did make the change intentionally, though. I do remember that!


What feels inherantly wrong to me is importing this data that is EE driven, but not synced.  I know it would be rare, but what if the student switches grades, campus or homeroome teacher during the middle of the school year.  I usually watch this data through early October (when our Development department works on division/homeroom giving contests) - and then just let it be the rest of the year.  


Which brings me to your question - why did we start storing the info.  Our development department began running (and therefore tracking and reporting on) division, grade level and homeroom giving with contests with pizza parties, etc. to the division, grade level and homeroom winners.  Therefore, we needed to be able to track this through the eductaion information as it related to the PARENT's or GRANDPARENT's records.  So the queires would filter by the relationship education STATUS (current student) and relationship education attributtes grade level, homeroom and division.  I set up a word merge through export for the development department to run for tracking this info.  


Hope this helps!!  

Alison Munson

@Kim Gifford

Kim, would you be willing to share excel file with me too? We haven't been using our Education Bio 1 tab correctly (AKA, not at all) . We have a new scholarship manager who would like to use our RE platform to it's full abilities. Do you have any useful information you can share with us? We provide a million dollars in scholarships but are not an educational institution. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

alison@mtcf.org