Although we sometimes wish we could start fresh and leave old data behind when getting into a new CRM, we gotta be real. We need our historic data to make our year-over-year reporting come to life! Use this article, and the others linked, as your guiding light to get your historic data into Element451 in a way that makes you successful and confident in tracking your goals and year-over-year comparisons.
Things to Consider When Creating Files
Things to Consider When Creating Files
Audience + Timing
Audience + Timing
To get started, your institution will need to make decisions on what record data from your previous system, SIS, or other tools you want to bring into Element451. We think of your historic data as two pieces, your true historic data, from years ago, and your live record data that you are actively recruiting for the upcoming term.
When it comes to your true historic data, we see our partners bringing in applications from 1-5 years in the past and prospects from 1-2 years in the past, but don’t view these numbers as a limitation. When thinking about how far in the past to pull, consider how you are going to use this information in Element451. Are you going to create communications for older prospects to see if you can gain their interest again? For reporting, do you want to see multiple years worth of applications to have a multi-year comparison? Regardless of your decision, your true historic data will want to be imported first as the data is not actively changing and updating.
For your live, active records, your team will need to decide the best time to bring them into the new system. This will depend on how quickly you start using the system. Other partners have imported their current prospects and used the campaigns and conversations modules to communicate with them. They will also update historic profiles if they start applications in their previous system. Other partners have waited till their Go-Live date to import their active records. Data can be imported multiple times to ensure that records are up to date as possible.
Creating the Files
Creating the Files
Once your team has determined how far back your historic data will go and the timing of when to import, it is time to create the files from the systems the data is coming from. Element451's Import and Export feature is very flexible when it comes to the layout or order of fields. The files will need to be a .csv or .txt. There also needs to be some sort of identifier present across all the files to use for matching records and preventing duplicate records from getting created.
We have found that it may be easier to understand our data structure and ensure historic data doesn't get overwritten by having separate imports for different parts of the record. For example, creating a file of their demographic data, a file for their application data, and a file for their test score data. In the articles linked below, you may choose to follow our templates for the different objects you can import into, or you may choose to create a custom layout and follow some general guidelines.
The most important thing, which will be noted through out these articles, is to pay attention to the files that need to be one row per record. Meaning a record cannot be listed twice in the files. If the import runs into a situation where a record is in two rows, it completely tosses out the data from the record further up on the file and only retains the latest occurrence. However, we know that records can apply more than once, or submit several test scores. We address these scenarios in the specific articles linked below.
Next Steps
Next Steps
Decide what parts of the profile your team wants to populate data into and your timeline of when to import historic and active records. You may choose to first focus on creating files for bio-demographic data, application data, and milestone data and then after implementation follow up with test scores and sources, for example. After creating the files, you will need to decide if you will be importing the data on your own, or if you would like the Element451 team to do so during implementation. Each article linked in the next section will instruct you on how to create your files and what data points you may want to include.
If you are post-implementation, reach out to your account manager to request historic data to be imported.
Historic Import Tasks
Historic Import Tasks
Make sure you review and have a familiarity with creating an import.
We walk through how to import into parts of the profile in each article, but that doesn't mean you have to import into every part. Regardless of what data you import, the Record Bio-Demographic Data should be the first file you import to establish the base profile.