Prospective Student/Family to Enrolled Student Change in Constituent ID

Miki Martin · July 2022

We are going to open RE to our Director of Admissions so she can start more easily tracking events, getting online payments, sending emails, etc. (using Google sheets and Constant Contact right now; our school does not use any Blackbaud products besides Development utilizing RE, much to my dismay). So I will be importing these prospective students and their parents with a different constituent code to isolate them from our standard people.

My question is, do you know of an easy way to then update Constituent IDs when these girls become students? I have started making the ID their student ID to tie to PowerSchool, where their school information is (although that does not talk with RE). I won't know their student ID until they enroll the spring prior to their freshmen year. I was going to use their graduation year in their ID like we do for current students but I'm afraid that will confuse things, unless I maybe preface it with their feeder school.

I appreciate any thoughts on this! Thank you all!

Karen Diener 2 · July 2022

@Miki Martin
I have used the SSN field to store external IDs. The reason I like is that it is available on the search screen, I can use it as a unique identifier to do imports, and I could change it through global change or import if necessary. There were enough instances where I needed to import information to RE that was from a student system, so this was helpful. It may or may not be an issue for you.

Alias might be a possibility because you can also search on that, but you cannot do imports as easily.

You may need to adjust security settings in database view in order to see the entire SSN.

My final question is whether or not you NEED to store their student ID. I had good reason to, but it really depends on your situation.

Karen

Jeannie Goings · July 2022

@Miki Martin we updated all of our constituent IDs by import after go-live. Our legacy system had leading zeros; we replaced the first zero with a one. Export the import ID along side the constituent ID, map to the new numbers and import. It's pretty simple.

Miki Martin · July 2022

@Karen Diener I am hoping that by storing the student ID in RE we will have a stronger argument for adding school Blackbaud products to help all of our systems ‘talk’ by showing an easy way to link them. I think our school system stores the students' SSN, though, so I have steered away from changing the purpose of this field.

We utilize Alias for several things already, like prior married names, Sisters' birth names (since they typically change when they take their vows), etc. so I worry we could have a longer list of aliases.

Thank you for the ideas. They are definitely something to consider!

@Jeannie Goings thank you for your experience! This is good to know and makes total sense. Not sure why it didn't dawn on me before I posted! Sometimes it is just difficult to see an answer when you are standing in the middle of the issue.

Rebecca Entwisle · July 2022

@Miki Martin
This is tangential to your original question, but might be worth thinking about. If you end up using the year of graduation in a Constituent ID, think twice before having it as the first two digits followed by a hyphen. (Eg. 24-12345) We did that, and now some the IDs turn into dates if you export them and then open the file in Excel. It's not an impossible problem to solve, but such a needless headache!

Miki Martin · July 2022

@Rebecca Entwisle that is definitely a good point! Fortunately for our school, they use a straight seven digits, the first four being the graduation year. To group the families together I have started adding “Par” to the end to note a parent (and Par2 for separate parent entries). Others might certainly hyphenate their numbers so this is very good to consider. Thanks!

Prospective Student/Family to Enrolled Student Change in Constituent ID

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