Importing new graduates/alumni into The Raiser's Edge

Kelly Galanis · February 2018

Hello,

Our campus is an Ellucian Banner school and the Institutional Advancement Office moved from Banner to The Raiser's Edge in 2015, and we added RE:NXT in early 2016. My question comes from the tremendous difficulty I have had with managing the import of new graduates/alumni from our Banner system into The Raiser's Edge. There are many fields to incorporate, and it seems as though everything was lined up correctly, but for some reason we have not been able to successfully roll our graduates into the system. Can you share any experiences you have with this type of complex import? We have even reached out to RE Help and they have not been able to guide us down the right path.

I appreciate any help you might be able to provide. Thank you!

Kelly

Becky Griswold 2 · February 2018

Hi Kelly,

I import students, parents, alumni into
Raiser’s Edge. The University uses Banner which does not
integrate with RE so I get reports that I then import using
ImportOmatic. If you’d like to discuss further, please let me
know!

Thanks,

Becky

_______________________________________________

Becky Griswold,
bCRE

Associate
Director of Records Administration

Development
and Alumni Relations

Judy
Farr Alumni and Development Center

Campus
Box 11

Greeley,
CO 80639

O:
970-351-4480

becky.griswold@unco.edu

give.unco.edu

Kelly Galanis · February 2018

Rebecca Griswold:

Hi Kelly,

I import students, parents, alumni into Raiser’s Edge. The University uses Banner which does not integrate with RE so I get reports that I then import using ImportOmatic. If you’d like to discuss further, please let me know!

Thanks,

Becky

_______________________________________________

Becky Griswold, bCRE

Associate Director of Records Administration

Development and Alumni Relations

Judy Farr Alumni and Development Center

Campus Box 11

Greeley, CO 80639

O: 970-351-4480

becky.griswold@unco.edu

give.unco.edu

Thanks, Becky. This is helpful. We are actually in the process of getting an Import-O-Matic demo and are looking into pricing. So, you have found it helpful I take it?

Kelly

Kelly A. Galanis, MSCIM, bCRE

Associate Director of Advancement

Communication and Information Services

Westfield State University

(413) 572-5228
kgalanis@westfield.ma.edu

Becky Griswold 2 · February 2018

Absolutely love ImportOmatic. Wouldn't be able to do my job without it.

Melissa S Graves · February 2018

It is SOOO much easier if you have IOM. Unfortunately it is not in our budget so we do it manually and it is hard. Once you do it once you can copy that process and it gets eaiser. It takes multiple imports and knowing your import IDs so the separate imports work together. It is not easy and takes coordination The first time it took me 2 weeks (not full time but still several hours a day working on it). Now I can do it in a couple days.

Melissa S Graves · February 2018

Melissa Graves:

It is SOOO much easier if you have IOM. Unfortunately it is not in our budget so we do it manually and it is hard. Once you do it once you can copy that process and it gets eaiser. It takes multiple imports and knowing your import IDs so the separate imports work together. It is not easy and takes coordination The first time it took me 2 weeks (not full time but still several hours a day working on it). Now I can do it in a couple days.

OH and IOM is not the only option, There is also Importacular from Zeidman Development that can do this.

Claudia Sauers · February 2018

Kelly,

As mentioned import-o-matic is an option as is importacular(free), we don't have import-o-matic in the budget and I don't love that I can't enlarge the importacular screen so I often build my own imports and map them out. It is a ton of work and super time consuming, but I can always easily save, stop and start a project.

Best of luck!

Kristin White · February 2018

Kelly Galanis:

Hello,

Our campus is an Ellucian Banner school and the Institutional Advancement Office moved from Banner to The Raiser's Edge in 2015, and we added RE:NXT in early 2016. My question comes from the tremendous difficulty I have had with managing the import of new graduates/alumni from our Banner system into The Raiser's Edge. There are many fields to incorporate, and it seems as though everything was lined up correctly, but for some reason we have not been able to successfully roll our graduates into the system. Can you share any experiences you have with this type of complex import? We have even reached out to RE Help and they have not been able to guide us down the right path.

I appreciate any help you might be able to provide. Thank you!

Kelly

Hi,

I import our alumni records into RE. We don't have import o matic or similar. It has taken me a while to get it right. I import a a lot of info for each alumni record- the hardest part was getting the hang of which of the education/relation import id's to copy/ repeat and which ones to let RE generate. Happy to chat with you about it.

Judy Spigarelli · February 2018

Kelly Galanis:

Hello,

Our campus is an Ellucian Banner school and the Institutional Advancement Office moved from Banner to The Raiser's Edge in 2015, and we added RE:NXT in early 2016. My question comes from the tremendous difficulty I have had with managing the import of new graduates/alumni from our Banner system into The Raiser's Edge. There are many fields to incorporate, and it seems as though everything was lined up correctly, but for some reason we have not been able to successfully roll our graduates into the system. Can you share any experiences you have with this type of complex import? We have even reached out to RE Help and they have not been able to guide us down the right path.

I appreciate any help you might be able to provide. Thank you!

Kelly

Hi Kelly,

I import students/parents into RE from a CSV file I receive from our IT Department. I'm happy to chat with you! Additionally, we just purchased ImportOMatic, so I can speak to how much easier the import process was last month vs the 5 years I've done the manual import.

Please let me know if you'd like to talk.

Judy Spigarelli ’93

Development Systems Analyst

Saint Anselm College | College Advancement

100 Saint Anselm Drive

Manchester, NH 03102

P: 603-641-7205

F: 603-641-7222
www.anselm.edu
Join us in launching futures…

Stay connected, visit social.anselm.edu

Betsy Waters 2 · February 2018

Hi Kelly,

I totally agree with the others that love Import O-Matic! It is so helpful and much easier when importing graduates.

Alan French · February 2018

More of the same here: we also use ImportOmatic to import from Banner into RE, and the dictionary feature in particular saves me endless hours of fiddling about with the incoming data to get it to conform to what we want in RE.

Tammie Cach Abdu · February 2018

Kelly Galanis:

Hello,

Our campus is an Ellucian Banner school and the Institutional Advancement Office moved from Banner to The Raiser's Edge in 2015, and we added RE:NXT in early 2016. My question comes from the tremendous difficulty I have had with managing the import of new graduates/alumni from our Banner system into The Raiser's Edge. There are many fields to incorporate, and it seems as though everything was lined up correctly, but for some reason we have not been able to successfully roll our graduates into the system. Can you share any experiences you have with this type of complex import? We have even reached out to RE Help and they have not been able to guide us down the right path.

I appreciate any help you might be able to provide. Thank you!

Kelly

Hi Kelly,

We are in the same boat as you, school is still on Banner, Advancement is on RE. We haven't imported any new alumni records since Dec 2016, which was the last class to graduate before we went to RE because of the difficulty and the need for multiple imports and for some reason they didn't roll properly in Banner either. My colleague and I will be following this thread eagerly, since we are also exploring Import-O-Matic as well.

Heather MacKenzie · April 2018

Kelly Galanis:

Hello,

Our campus is an Ellucian Banner school and the Institutional Advancement Office moved from Banner to The Raiser's Edge in 2015, and we added RE:NXT in early 2016. My question comes from the tremendous difficulty I have had with managing the import of new graduates/alumni from our Banner system into The Raiser's Edge. There are many fields to incorporate, and it seems as though everything was lined up correctly, but for some reason we have not been able to successfully roll our graduates into the system. Can you share any experiences you have with this type of complex import? We have even reached out to RE Help and they have not been able to guide us down the right path.

I appreciate any help you might be able to provide. Thank you!

Kelly

Looks like nobody's mentioned it yet... there's also a Plug-in called "Importacular" which does some importing for free, which you may want to check out if not ready to purchase Import-o-Matic quite just yet. I haven't been able to go play with it yet, but I know others on here are pretty big fans of it and find it quite useful.

Damon Rosenthal · April 2018

We are in the same situation since conversion from Banner to RE and with the University still on Banner. I will be looking through this thread carefully. In fact I see Tammie from our team has also responded here. :-) Every institution is different, but it would be nice to share/compare import mappings.

Therese Morris · April 2018

When we first converted from Banner to Raiser's Edge our IT created a custom export and Blackbaud created a custom import for new Alumni. It worked, but as time changed so did the information we wanted imported. We got ImportOmatic in 2015 and it has made all the difference. It allows us to apply defaults and add solicit codes and clean up the data imported so there is less manual cleanup after import. Feel free to contact me if you want more details.

Therese M. Morris MS‘14

Assistant Director of Advancement Services - Technology

University of Hartford | Office of Institutional Advancement

200 Bloomfield Avenue | West Hartford, CT 06117

P 860.768.2428 | F 860.768.2454

E tmorris@hartford.edu

Mark Guncheon 2 · April 2018

Tammie Cach Abdu:

Kelly Galanis:

Hello,

Our campus is an Ellucian Banner school and the Institutional Advancement Office moved from Banner to The Raiser's Edge in 2015, and we added RE:NXT in early 2016. My question comes from the tremendous difficulty I have had with managing the import of new graduates/alumni from our Banner system into The Raiser's Edge. There are many fields to incorporate, and it seems as though everything was lined up correctly, but for some reason we have not been able to successfully roll our graduates into the system. Can you share any experiences you have with this type of complex import? We have even reached out to RE Help and they have not been able to guide us down the right path.

I appreciate any help you might be able to provide. Thank you!

Kelly

Hi Kelly,

We are in the same boat as you, school is still on Banner, Advancement is on RE. We haven't imported any new alumni records since Dec 2016, which was the last class to graduate before we went to RE because of the difficulty and the need for multiple imports and for some reason they didn't roll properly in Banner either. My colleague and I will be following this thread eagerly, since we are also exploring Import-O-Matic as well.

Not familiar with Banner but I assume when you export info from Banner, it creates certain columns and rows of data. If this is in the same format each time you export, you should be able to import this into RE. As has been stated above, it may take 2 or 3 imports for each collection/group of data for each constituent. This is the price you pay for not using outside importing software. But it is not that difficult. You essentially determine what data can go in on which import. I would be glad to help you set this up. Send me a sample record of all the column headings from Banner and I'll send you the sample import files you'll need to import them into RE. Once you test those and they work to your satisfaction, you use those files as templates for all future imports.

For example, we have guests who stay at our guest house while they visit a patient in the hospital. We need to track their bio info plus time they were a guest and what doctor they visited. This is done through 3 imports. For each, I pull out the columns I need, save and import. Very easy.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Matthew Crawford · April 2018

When we first installed RE, we had to cleanup the import file and do a complex import process. We the process was handed to me, I developed a custom program that would clean up the files automatically for importing. I then re-wrote the app to use RE's API, so everything was automatic at that point. When we upgraded to NXT, we could no longer use RE's API, so I wrote another app in Python to cleanup the files and produce importable CSV files for RE. I'm planning to write a new app to utilize the SKY API and automate the process once again. Hopefully, I will have time to do it this year. I'm also planning to use SQL Server Integration Services to get the data directly from Banner, storing it in temporary SQL tables, to bypass Banner's export files entirely.

We looked at Import-O-Matic, and while it was a nice piece of software, the cost and the fact I already had an import tool, kept up from purchasing it.

Bill Downey · May 2019

Melissa Graves:

Melissa Graves:

It is SOOO much easier if you have IOM. Unfortunately it is not in our budget so we do it manually and it is hard. Once you do it once you can copy that process and it gets eaiser. It takes multiple imports and knowing your import IDs so the separate imports work together. It is not easy and takes coordination The first time it took me 2 weeks (not full time but still several hours a day working on it). Now I can do it in a couple days.

OH and IOM is not the only option, There is also Importacular from Zeidman Development that can do this.

Now that you have process figured out and knowing what you know would you purchase ImportOmatic if budget permitted?

Bill
Bill Downey, BMgmt, PMP | Project Manager

Solution Delivery Services
Information Technology Services

Memorial University of Newfoundland

St. John’s, Newfoundland

T 709 864 7534

Importing new graduates/alumni into The Raiser's Edge

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