National Student Clearing House Data

Kenneth Eye

My school has a large Excel document from the National Student Clearinghouse with reports on our gradutes and the colleges they have attended/graduated from. But we have an issue processing this data into Raiser's Edge in the form it's given to us. I recently inherited this project and despite taking Import 1 I'm still not entirely sure how to go about it. Does anyone else use the National Student Clearinghouse data and if you do, how do you process it into RE? 


-Kenneth

Development Coordinator

Randolph-Macon Academy

Joanne Felci 2

Hi Kenneth,

I've not had to import data from the National Student Clearinghouse but have done a lot of imports.


Are you trying to match the data with constituents already in RE?


If so I'm assuming the excel document they gave you would not include constituent IDs (very key for any import)


If you are trying to upload the data into constituents in RE the first thing you need to do is match them up with their Con IDs


How many people are we talking about?  (i.e. 100s or 1,000s).  What identifying information do you have in the document from the National Student Clearinghouse (just first/last name or are their mailing addresses or emails or other demographic data that you might already have in RE to help you match people up).


If it wasn't thousands of people (lets say less than 5,000 people or whatever your threshold might be) what I would do is


1. Export the data I have in RE - Con ID, first/last name and whatever demographic data (mailing address, email, etc.) you have in the spreadsheet from the National Student Clearinghouse


2. Combine both spreadsheets into one, making sure columns for first/last name and any demographic info are lined up.


3. Keep a master worksheet for all data, then create a copy to look for any duplicates, as you might want to look for duplicates on various columns, depending on the amount of data you have


4. highlight a column of demographic information (email would be my preference) and look for duplicate values (Home ribbon - Conditional Formatting - Highlight Cell Rules - Duplicate Values) and see if you can match people up that way


There are a lot of excel gurus on the boards that might have better ways to do this - some more fancy formulas and such - and if all you have is first/last name depending on how well you know people you might not be able to match people this way.


Good luck!

Joanne