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FORUMBest Practices for Managing the Rollover of Student Records into

The Raiser’s Edge

John McManus

Senior Consultant

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INT RODUCT IONS BY

T HE NUM BE RS

John McManus

Senior Consultant

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OVERVIEW

Some campuses have struggled with deciding

when to add students to their Raiser’s Edge

database. Should we add them when they apply?

Upon enrollment? When they graduate? We have

often found that it is premature to add applicants

to your system; data management at this early

stage can prove to be more work than it is worth

for the Alumni Relations and Advancement

Services areas. The internal decision-making

process often initiates upon enrollment.

The purpose of this presentation is to help higher

education institutions through this decision-

making process by highlighting the pros and cons

of bringing those records into the database and

managing them effectively.

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• Solicitation of parents – you know who they are and can ask them for money

• If you want to segment parents by student’s class year, major (e.g., let’s call

parents of business majors, or arts & sciences majors, or freshman parents), you

can.

• You can collect student activities as they are involved in them (who was on the

debate team this year, who was on the basketball team this year, etc., etc.).

• By capturing students upon enrollment, you can associate alums with the

graduating class they enrolled with (vs. the class they graduated with if different),

which can often be their preferred class year.

• If you are tracking scholarship recipients, they are already in the system.

• Solicitation of graduating seniors – senior class gift

• If a student makes a gift, they are already in the system.

ADDING S T UDE NT S UP ON E NROL L M E NT – P ROS

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• You must be VIGILANT about marking students who have withdrawn, been

dismissed from the school, are not graduating on time, etc. on a regularly

scheduled basis (e.g., quarterly, monthly, weekly, by semester).

• Synching data across various departments (Admissions, Registrar, etc.) can

become an administrative nightmare. Some departments have different data

entry standards. Some are more diligent about pristine data entry than others.

• If people graduate and then re-enroll as graduate students, you need to be on

the lookout that they don’t get re-entered as a duplicate constituent.

ADDING S T UDE NT S UP ON E NROL L M E NT – CONS

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S AM P L E W ORKF L OW

No

Yes

Begin process

1.

Identify a need to add

or update alumni,

student, and/or parent

information

Registrar System

4.

Are there

exceptions?

End process

5.

Import or manually

enter the new or

updated biographical

information

2.

Obtain an import file

from Registrar system

Data fileThe Raiser’s Edge

3.

Run data imports

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COMMON CHALLENGES

• Duplicate records

• Parent to student relationships

• Student activity dates

• Multiple constituencies

• Changes in status

• Data sharing policies and FERPA

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KEY CONSIDERATIONS

• Don’t allow exceptions to delay your import processing

• Sometimes manual entry is the best option

• Is it worth tracking in The Raiser’s Edge (e.g., student activities

while they’re students)

• ROI analysis of parent, faculty/staff, and affinity-based alumni

solicitations

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ANALYSIS

• Output Queries

• Summary Information Exports

• Appeal Performance Analysis

• Alumni Class Analysis

• Parent Class Analysis

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SOLUTIONS

• The Raiser’s Edge

• Query, Export, Standard Imports, and Global Changes

• Quality control analysis

• Cleanup of imported records

• Deduplication tools

• Import-O-Matic

• Less data file manipulation

• Data dictionaries

• On the fly deduplication

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