ImportOmatic - Efficiency Metrics

@Cindy McAdam
We use Omatic to import membership transactions and the efficiency it provides is constituent and membership imports can be done in one pass. An RE process would require a constituent import then a membership import.

I'd suggest seeing if any of your imports involve a similar improvement. Does the RE option require multiple passes?

@Cindy McAdam Hi… We've had Raiser's Edge for about 12 years and ImportOmatic for 11 of those years… We tried going the first year using RE's import tool. It worked great for simple imports, but once we got into importing alumni, freshmen students and their parents we quickly realized we needed a better solution.

We have about four people in Advancement Services and one IT person assigned to most of our projects.

Setup of ImportOmatic was “easy” in the sense that they helped, but there is a bit of a learning curve to figure out the best way to handle all the data coming in. You need to think about how you want to find duplicates, require manual input, check over certain fields, etc. I think our initial setup probably took a week or two of us playing around with fields, discussing options and formatting our input file before we really got our import working well. It's not difficult, but there are a ton of options and settings and it gets a little overwhelming at times. This is especially true if you only run imports a few times as year as we do.

Our alumni import process used to take about two weeks from start to finish. We now have it down to a bit of a science. Our IT department can produce the alumni file in about 10 minutes. I then check for few new field codes (majors, student clubs, etc) and update our tables. After that I always do a ‘test run" of one record just to make sure I didn’t screw anything up (I usually screw up something).. ahem.. but the actual import of 1,400 alumni only takes about… three hours? Most of that is just confirming address changes and manually choosing whether or not a person is a duplicate or not. We COULD probably speed that up a bit by dialing back some of the sensitivity on address differences, but I don't mind.

Not going to lie: things aren't perfect. After the import the data is there but there are still a few little things we have to manually clean up, so we then spend the next few days going through a query of the imported records and double-checking relationships, primary degrees, cleaning up minor codes, etc. We try to get all alumni into RE and ready for mailing/emailing within 30 days of graduation and we hit that goal pretty consistently.

We easily cut our work time in half, but it's really more than that because the cleanup is just done intermittently afterwards. Some of the biggest time savers for us is simply the ability to replace our academic codes with our OWN codes RE as the import runs. So a code like CLUB-COMS-4333-COMMSERVCLUB comes from our academic system but we put it into RE as [CO]-Community Service Club. We have this set up for hundreds (okay, probably thousands) of codes now.

We haven't done much importing of records other than constituents.

Forgot what other questions you asked (can't move the window, hate this forum software… ahem)… but feel free to drop me a message if you have more questions…