new students

Jesse Calagna 2 · February 2020

We have a lot of incoming students (and parents) every year and was wondering if anyone has any solutions to easily import of all the information. We have RE Connect but the fields are not the same and it is not ideal. If we do a mass export from CORE and then an IMPORT into RE, then there is lots of manual work. Any suggestions?

Karen Stuhlfeier · February 2020

We bought Importomatic for this and it works great. The package we bought from them included a lot of individual training.

Before that I used constituent batch in RE. Using that I could at least set up defaults for the fields that we going to be the same on each record.

Katherine Manniion · February 2020

At a previous K-12 school, I did it just the way you're describing, and yep, lots of manual work. But honestly, I like the intimacy of importing in segments (new students first, then their parents in another import. I also segmented by grade so that the files would be more manageable) because it gave me an opportunity to catch the relationships (ie parents who are alums, current students who are siblings). It was helpful that the registrar and I had standardized our data entry, so I had little to do on that front, but otherwise to be done right it was tedious work.

Good luck!

Katherine

Anna Zimmerman · February 2020

I would have students sign up using an electronic form that can be converted into an excel sheet and then imported. Google Forms has some good functionality to do this.

Christine Cooke 2 · March 2020

Yeah I think you will get several folks suggesting iimportomatic for this task if your volume is of any size. S

ince I'm at a school that currently only has an incoming new student group of 60-70 and they trickle in over approximately 4 months, I do them manually because we immediately add new families to our mail lists etc.

Tom Klimchak · March 2020

Yep, we use ImportOMatic to import about 1,000 freshman records each year along with their parent records. It takes a few hours to import but then, yes, there are a few days of manual cleanup that's needed after the fact. That's MUCH better than the few weeks it used to take us to do things manually.

Karen Stuhlfeier · March 2020

Yes - just what Tom said. Don't let the omatic people tell you that everything will be automatic. There is still manual work that needs to be done, but it is so much faster than doing it any other way.

Maura Coppola · March 2020

This is my situation, as well. Is anyone using RE Connect with success? Our experience was not the best, lots of clean up.

Would love to have a solution to this. Definitely need an approach to this data migration to include students, and resulting relationships of parents, grandparents.

Importomatic?????

Thanks!

Maura

Carlene Johnson · March 2020

Maura Coppola‍, the only way I've been able to do this without driving myself insane has been to use ImportOmatic. At a previous organization, I was able to set up a series of 5 passes of importing which brought in (or updated) the student and parents, linked the students to the parents, link the parents to each other, bring in the primary business of each of the parents, and then link the siblings (because the system from which I was importing had a sibling indicator and family id). Each student could have up to 4 parents based on divorce and remarriage, and this covered all of that. I still had some queries and global changes to run after doing my imports, but I could do those 5 passes in an afternoon compared to the whole process taking a couple of weeks! Can't say enough about how good the tool is, as well as the training, and support!

Gina Smith 2 · March 2020

This is my first year using Connect RE to do this. We went to great lengths to make sure we had our fields in order and ready before we began syncing. Our new students are beginning to come over in the sync process. They are coming over with the education status = "incoming students." In the past, we have not entered these into RE until the summer using imports and lots of manual touches. So far, I'm still manually changing the following fields for new students and their parents:

Const. Code - date from (It is entering the process date, instead of our preferred date of the first day of the new school year)

Salutations - this can be imported, but since I had to manually touch the records anyway, I used "load defaults" to set these

Add sibling relationships to new students (Connect RE adds the parents and their students, but doesn't connect the siblings)

So far, this seems easier than my import and manual update/check process in the past.

But in full disclosure - I haven't tried a 3rd party import tool, and this is my first group of "new" linked records - so we'll see how things shake out as the end/beginning of year process unfolds.

Damon Rosenthal · March 2020

Actually we have Omatic as well and it has been good, but I just completed the "RE Building a Better Batch" class and you can use RE Batch process to import new constituents and reach many fields. I have not used it yet though and hear you may have to do multiple processes to get all the data populated that you want. If it is simple data for new students, then it might be a viable option. There were lots of replies so my apologies if I repeated a prior response.

Good luck!

new students

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