RI Member Synchronisation

Have you gone through their step-by-step process?
Guide: https://www.clubrunnersupport.com/api/v1/articles/464/attachments/66987/url
Video: http://www.screencast.com/users/Clu...os/media/19293c7c-1b8e-4b0d-9d4d-c8d6493b5ec2

Once you have that in place, there is the Compare & Sync tool that does go 1 by 1 to correct items that are not currently matched up\conflict.
https://www.clubrunnersupport.com/article/701-how-to-use-the-compare-synchronize-function

From a district perspective, EACH CLUB has to go thorough and opt into this process, you cannot activate this for all clubs in the district without them choosing to sync their club. I'm a district administrator as well, and getting the clubs to take the steps to opt in has been a challenge.

 

Hi Bob,
Pretty OK will all the protocols which as we both know are many, but it still leaves me with the question. Do we have to open each individual name file, check and adjust accordingly by using "compare" then save?
If this is the case the task ahead is enormous. I have 18 members in my club, have re synchronised 3 which took 15 minutes even using fast NBN.

 

You make a good point, Chris. I have always just looked at the header of "Members In Sync", and presumed that everything was fully matched up between RI and CR, so we didn't have to go through each member. However, I did a compare of myself in my club, and there were some fields that were NOT synchronized (specifically Sponsor and Join Date).

Clubrunner support (which is closed today for the holiday), please address this concern. How can a member be listed as "In Sync", but not have the data synchronized between the two databases?!?!

 

Hello Bob & Chris,

Thank you for the feedback! Let me do my best to address your questions & concerns.

You are not missing a shortcut, at this time compare and sync process can only be run in a single member's profile. This is something we are looking into, so that Districts & Clubs have improved tools to get an overview and are able to make bulk changes more quickly.

Part of the slowness of the compare and sync pages are connecting to Rotary to get the data and then doing the comparison. We are looking at ways to try to make this faster in whatever way we can.

Members in Sync is a category on the Compare and Sync page that shows that members are matching their First Name, Last Name, and Rotary ID between both databases. This ensures that when supported changes are made they will be sent to Rotary International. There are many reasons why some data between ClubRunner and Rotary data may be different such as:

• Changes were made directly on Rotary.org
• Changes were made before integration was enabled
• Changes were made when the member was not syncing properly, an example would be if the First Name, Last Name, and or Rotary ID did not match between both systems
• Changes were made while a privacy setting restricted that flow of data

I hope that helps explain why data may be different between the two systems in some cases, but the members themselves are still in sync.

 

Thank you for that explanation.

Is there any way to schedule a "Full compare" (that can take 24+ hours), then come back and look at the records that have any differences (flagged somehow, or categorized). Currently, to be accurate, we have to periodically check everyone, just to make sure there isn't anything that was missed at some point. The more you can do to filter out those that are 100% matched, the easier the process will be.

 

We got a warning recently when there were fields missing in our Clubrunner profiles. I know this isn't the same as getting the synchronization differences, but verifying the clubrunner data may be a start.

 

That is a good idea, but what do you think of this idea:
We could make an option on the "RI Compare and Synchronize" page to compare all members which do not have their data matched between ClubRunner and RI. When you first click on this button it will load the first member of the Club alphabetically from ClubRunner and RI to compare. In the background it will load the next members who need to be compared. If the member's data matches between ClubRunner and RI, they will not be loaded. After you compare and correct the first member, you can click "Next" and it will take you to the second member. After you correct that member, you can click "Next" and it will take you to the next member, and so on. This way you will correct all of the members who have issues. These pages would load quickly because they would preload while you compare the first member. Do you think this would be a good enhancement? The only downside of this I can see is the user would have to go through all of the members with issues, but they might want to do this to correct them all. What do you all think?

Could you please tell me more about the warning? Was it the country code for the phone numbers? If it was, we recently corrected this issue.

 

That is not a bad idea David with one exception.
If you check say 15 members for instance then decide that is enough for the session, can you bale out and not lose the data you have processed?

 

Yes, after you click the "Next" button it would save the data you changed. This way if something comes up, you can cancel out of it and finish it later.

 

David, Sorry it's been a year, but yes, ANYTHING would be better than the 1 by 1 sync and review process and how painfully slow it is. Even going to a "Next" button instead of out, back in , wait to load, then review, .... And repeat. I try to review my whole club at least once of month, and my 25 member club takes me over an hour to check

 

How are we going on this? I manage a district Clubrunner which has 61 clubs and will soon have 125 clubs after a merger. With the best will in the world we will *never* convince all club secretaries to learn a new process to update member data. Clunky as it may be, they know how to update their members on the RI site, and there is the added incentive that they have to be able to do this to fulfil RI requirements. Getting them to switch to managing their membership on a district clubrunner is a pipe dream.

Right now, I have a process whereby about once a week I visit each club's member synchronisation page and do any adds or terminations required. If I could press a button on that page and get list of the members in sync that have mismatches in contact data (but only in fields that we import! for example our district will not import home addresses), then that would also be doable. The situation now where I have to individually check each member is pretty unworkable.

 

I too have been asking for this for some time now - being able to click a button at the district level and get a list of member synch data would be awesome. To go through each member is much too tedious with 1900 members. Our clubs won't do it so we try to do it at the District level and it is overwhelming us.

 

Yes. Even something as primitive as being able to get a report out in .csv format of all field mismatches would be a big improvement on the current situation. There needs to be a way of managing by exception for contact data. Even at club level that would be a bonus, let alone at district level.

 

Yes Mark - that would help. We just cannot keep up with it otherwise!

 

While on the topic of RI Synchronisation, is there any plan to extend RI Synchronisation to Rotaract clubs? RI seem to allow management vendors including clubrunner for Rotaract clubs, but as of now I am told Clubrunner does not support RI synch for Rotaract clubs. (Please correct me if my understanding is incorrect.)

This is becoming a bit of a headache because the distinction between Rotary clubs and Rotaract clubs is gradually disappearing. Rotaract clubs will be paying some district dues from July 1 over here, and they will be expecting district services on par with Rotary clubs. That means entering them up in Clubrunner and of course their members count towards the annual subscription costs to a certain extent. It's a bit of a growth area here, too!

 

Same here in the USA - Rotaract Clubs are becoming seamless and are to start paying dues. This would be on par and helpful. We need to see ClubRunner moving foward in conjuction with RI plans for Rotaract and the synch issues across all spectrums.

 

What I am doing at the moment is from time to time downloading the bounces and blocked page from an all-members bulletin stats in html format. Then I open that html file in excel and trim the top and bottom. Then I use a combination of members search and the previous bounce file I created to populate a "club" column in that file.

Once I have created this file and sorted it by club, I go though comparing the members in the file for those clubs that have enabled sync to fix the ones that have already been updated in RI.

Then, for each club I pull a member report with just a few columns including email address as it is known by clubrunner. I add in a column for bounce messages and paste those across for the members whose emails are bouncing. Then I send that report to the club secretaries as a courtesy info thing. That generates quite a few updates on RI and after a couple of days I go though the bounces again with the synch comparison.

The process seems to be having positive impact, but all up it takes me about 20 minutes per club and our district will soon have 110 clubs. (district merger.) Anything that could be done in clubrunner to shave a few minutes per club off this process would have a huge impact for me over the course of a year. Some things that spring to mind:

1. A bounce report that drops out the current bounce/drop/blocked list by club in .csv format.
2. A .csv report of contact data mismatches for clubs that are synching. (I could run this weekly or more likely monthly along with my check for inductions/terminations)

Then all I have to do is get the rest of our clubs to enable sync on RI. So far just under half our clubs have done that after about 9 months. Of course, a quick process to make that synch produce results will help me in this campaign.