Creating Individual Relationships between large numbers of students and parents

John Geoffrion 2

Hi, I work for a school where we are in the process of entering new students and new parents in RE. That's done, but now we need to create individual relationships (Parents/Daughter, etc) between these newly-created groups, as well as 'legacy' relationships (alums who are relatives, older siblings, etc). Is there an easy way to create these relationships in something resembling an import file in one fell swoop, or do we just have to go in and create them all one by one?


Thanks

John

Ryan Hyde

Yeah, you can do a Individual Relationship import, found within the Constituent directory within the Import module. You would need to spend some time setting up the file, deciding who goes with whom, what the relationship type, reciprocal relationship type, and all that other stuff is. The main key here is that you'll need the constituent import ID of the constituent you're adding as a relationship to the 'host' relationship. You'll plug this into the "Relationship Link" field when you're setting up the import.


So let's say you're starting with all of the students, and you're adding parent relationships to them. You'll need the student's constituent ID or the import ID to start with, but then you'll need the parents import ID and feed that into the Relationship Link in import. You'll probably want to look up some KB articles on the topic, or if you're experienced with imports in general, then just spend some time looking at all of the options available in the Individual Relationship module and see what fields would be useful. 


Here's a good KB article to start with: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/37805