As museums move from onsite systems to hosted platforms like from Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge (RE) to Altru, there are certain considerations that will ensure smooth your transition.
- Review records. This this is the time for cleanup of things like 7 digit local contact numbers from decades ago that should be put in as ten digit phone numbers.
- Get counts of active and inactive members
- Decide with your executive team if you would be bringing to new system records where membership has lapsed, those that passed away or have been inactive for years
- From our experience, we suggest you bring entire data. That way if a member comes back years later, you will have history on that member and quickly acknowledging an appreciation for being member is past will go long way in strengthening the bond for longer term association with your institution in years to come.
- In Raisers Edge, make sure every constituent that has a partner record attached has a Constituent # of its own. This is very critical and your Blackbaud rep will surely tell you that.
- One way to assign constituent ID to partner records is to go into each member record, click on partner records and check that. However, if you have thousands of members this could be a very time consuming process. Get help from someone who understands the data structure of Raisers edge to be able to go into your live system to do that at the back-end and is very sure of not to mess things up!
- Assuming you have success taking care of that; now you may have one last challenge before you are ready for migration. Check if there are any “orphan records” that won’t migrate to Altru. These will be records that are not partner records and do not have a ConstituentID assigned. Yes they do exist even if you did previous step correctly and you will find them if you were to open each member record and check. Other option again will be to seek expert help and to go into tables and find those out.
- Once this is done you are good to go for migration. Enjoy your new Altru system! Do check new system records against old system.
About us: MuseumAnywhere is a division of InfiCare Technologies located in Washington DC metro area since 2001. Our team has a good understanding and experience on Blackbaud’s Raisers Edge, Altru and TMS. We can help making sure that your system is ready for migration, take away pain of having to manually checking thousands of records and take care of things in just a few days so your system will be ready to migrate to Altru. We will even check Altru post-migration. If you are looking for getting more value out of Raisers Edge by doing integrations to other systems and offer cool things like E-Membership cards, then we have “connectors” that we can quickly deploy.
About Author: Sumer Mathur is founder and president of MuseumAnywhere based in Dulles VA
