Does your university have one RE database for Alumni and Development offices?

Pamela Wegener:

Interested to hear from those universities that have separate alumni relations and development offices who share the RE database. How do you handle the division of tasks such as data entry, event registrations, graduate uploads, etc.? Thank you.

Hi Pamela,

We use the same policies and procedures for both teams so everything stays consistant.  Our alumni team does all the alumni data entry and the major gifts team does all other data entry.  If an alum becomes a major gift prospect - the major gift team owns the data updates.  Hope this is helpful.

Hi Pam,


I worked at a university in a previous life and this is how we handled it. Alumni uploads were handled by the development office since the primary purpose of their record was gift solicitation. Event registrations were handled by the office that was hosting the event, however there was crossover if the event registration was done through online express. We were housed in the same physical office so keeping that line of communication open was managable. Data entry again was split based on the nature of the data entry, if someone was called by a member of AR to facilitate a visit, or to come speak at an event etc. they would log that action. If a note was received in response to an annual fund solicitation development would log that action. I would say that the development office maintained 95% of Raisers Edge entry as they were the "owners" of the program, while AR had access to it. I would say it largely depends on the history of your departments, and culture of your organization, for example our development office staff was pretty consistent and when AR turned over, development picked up the slack in the transition and that is most likely why it was maintained that way.Our development office also managed quite a few of the larger university events which I know is an abnormality for other institutions.


Best of luck!

Pamela Wegener:

Hi Maggie,


Thank you for the reply. To clarify, does someone in the alumni office have the same Admin rights as the development office? For instance, does the alumni office update tables, etc. using the established protocols? Does the alumni data entry include the graduate upload?  All the Best, Pam

We have one administrative/data manager that works with both teams.