We are working on ideas/possibilities to prevent importing duplicates of our students/alumni/graduates into Raiser's Edge.  One of the ideas that was presented to us when we first started working with Import-O-Matic was to use the student ID # in the Alias so that IOM has another field as the criteria for duplicates. 

Has anyone tried this?  If so, how did it work for you? 

Our main issue with that is that we don't have id #'s for all - our alumni base goes back quite a ways and using this form of student id is recent - so we wouldn't be able to use it for all.  It would give us another avenue but not a complete coverage. 

Would love to hear what others are using for this issue - any suggestions would be great. 

Thanks!
Sue

I think we are in the same boat, and we use that fairly frequently. We're a hospital foundation, and we have a pretty good employee donor program. We enter the employee's HR number as an alias when we have it, and it greatly helps all sorts of imports. We don't always have that number in RE--not ever for the newest employees--but if we match on an existing record, it will ADD it!! It is awesomely awesome and worth the initial setup. Good luck. :)

Hi Sue,

I use IOM to import new graduates into Raiser's Edge we have the student number saved to the ID2 or SSNum field in RE.

Since using IOM for the past 6 months or so has made the import process a lot smoother as when using IOM you can update addresses on the fly when using other database data for your student details.

Previously using RE Import process we were left with an exception file that had to be manually reviewed for newer address and biographical details for any constituents that already existed in RE.

It takes a little while to understand the configuration but once you understand to importing steps with IOM it will reduce your post import clean up work.

Hope this helps.

Travis Stone
Monash University
Melbourne, Australia