Hi!

I am interested in knowing what is the general practice regarding primary alumni and degrees in Raiser's Edge.

Polytechnique -where I work with Raiser's Edge- is a school of engineering. The alumni is usually identified as "Name Po Year", Po Year beeing the first degree obtained at Polytechnique, usually a bachelor degree. But we have the following argument: some people think that when the bachelor is from another school or university, and that the first  degree obtained at Polytechnique is a Master or a Ph D., we should not used the primary alumni for that alumni. I for one think that the first degree obtained here at Polytechnique should correspond to the primary alumni and that the graduate be identifed as such. I am wondering if anybody has a similar experience or problematic. Thanks.

Richard Coveney   richard.coveney@polymtl.ca

Hi Richard,

We do exactly what you think should be done. The record marked as the Primary Alumni is the one that contains the first degree from our shool. It does not matter if it is a bachelor's degree or a masters' degree. Our thinking is we want to know know why this person is interested in (or should be interested in our school. And the main reason for most of our constituents is they graduated here. And we need to know what class to associate them with and if it is a bachelors or masters degree. We do differentiate with reunions, phonathons, some mailings and other things.

HTH,

laura

 We're not a school, but we still have alumni.  The residents and fellows at our hospital are our alumni.  Our "degrees" are never the first degree that a person receives, but we still mark the resident or fellow education record as the primary degree, because that is the record we want to use when contacting our alumni for class reunions.

Drew