RE7 or NXT with Veracross

Brian Davies

We are currently transitioning to Veracross to run our Student Information System and would love some feedback from anyone who is using RE7 or NXT with Veracross.

What works well?

What needs improvements?

How have you managed to get the systems working together (or not)?

If you had to do it again what would you do different?

Karen Stuhlfeier

Our school has Veracross and they do not integrate - and would you really want them to? You need to decide what information you want from Veracross and decide how you'll get it into RE. For us that means student and parent contact information and some of the student activities that we have decided are interesting information for our fundraising efforts. Most of the student information belongs in Veracross and does not need to be in RE. Our office has access to Veracross and can export information from it. I compare the student list in Veracross with RE several time a year to make sure that we've kept up with new and withdrawn students that happen during the school year. We receive email alerts when those changes happen. We update our addresses in RE quarterly using address finder and we often have more current data in RE. I'm not sure that Veracross provides those kind of data health services? 


We have been using constituent batch to get our new student and family data into RE and that has worked pretty well. We have about 150 new students a year. We just bought Importomatic and will begin using it this summer. I've used the product in the past and I know that it will make our processes be more efficient once we get the import templates set up.

Elizabeth Johnson

Hi Brian,


We use RE7/NXT with Veracross. Veracross works really well for the academic side of the school. I like that it is a truly integrated system (should we have decided to use it for development) with only one record per constituent vs. the linked records that RE had with EE. We decided to stay with RE7 (at the time we are on NXT now) because the development piece of Veracross was not nearly as robust. Veracross is working to change that.


We have considerably less new students a year than Karen Stuhlfeier‍. We usually have between 60 and 80 new students and we use Omatic's ImportOmatic (IOM) to bring in the students to our system along with their relationships. I then promote the relations I want to be the main record holder as we don't want full records for both in a couple unless they both have a relationship to the school. Then I import the relations to the newly promoted record holders. I have done a little tweaking when relations have the same name. Our legacy families always take longer to manage. Then we populate the new parent employee and education information using IOM.


Our data entry person runs an audit log query in Veracross once a week (as we have access to Veracross) to check for things like address/email/phone/marital status changes and adjust RE accordingly. We haven't managed to keep the records out of that for applicants but checking it weekly makes it more manageable. 


I also have the ability to edit Veracross so I update any addresses we come across in AddressFinder or mark someone as deceased. I have a Google doc I update that with duplicate record issues for admission or registrars office to resolve more or less at their leisure.


I really like the ability to export any field from Veracross. I would really like the ability to have more one to one fields in Veracross for things like RE ID.


Having a different email system from Veracross is beneficial as we use Online Express. I always hated when our parents would unsubscribe from a fundraising email and have that impact their getting reports on their students when we used Constant Contact or Mail Chimp, prior to Online Express.


If I could have done one thing differently would have been to have more time to clean up the alumni that were in EE before being migrated to Veracross as when didn't integrate our alumni records. We had only been integrated for a few years before this transition and since we had been on RE since 1987 and EE since the early 90's we had to draw a line in the sand for linking when RE and EE were integrated. Either that or to not have imported that info into Veracross at all - but relations are just so important.


The biggest thing to remember is that in the development world we are in it for the long haul. The day-to-day transactions matter but only in the sense that they contribute to the whole. The academic side is much more interested in the here and now. Mapping out what is important to both sides before going in will benefit all.


Good luck to you!


Best,

Elizabeth