Banner Advancement Benefits to the Campus

Banner Advancement is scheduled to go live during the April 30th – May 5th window.  Bringing Advancement up is a significant milestone in the Banner system journey for UNC Charlotte. 

The migration from the legacy Millenium system that has been utilized to track university donor records over the last decade will result in new information available for some Banner users in addition to the University Development and Alumni Affairs Division staff.  Banner Advancement not only offers more effective tools to support fundraising and alumni engagement, it also gives us a 360 degree view of all of our constituency’s activity with the university from the time they enroll through their decades long involvement as alumni.

While the Development and Alumni Affairs staff are excited about this implementation, we wanted the campus community to understand a few of the highlights of how other staff across campus will benefit as well:

• All of the donor names will be migrated from Millenium into Banner.  Updated address and contact information will be loaded into Banner where available for all constituents who are not currently active students or active employees.
  
  
• Information about alumni and donors will also be loaded into Banner and accessible by those with the required security privileges.
  
  
• A new Transcript name type will be utilized to retain the name used for transcript generation whenever a former student has requested their donor name records be updated due to a life event.
  
  
• A new process linking city, county, and zip code tables will facilitate the use of an “auto complete” feature within Banner to populate data based upon zip code to aid in data entry of new addresses.
  
  
• A new Banner form called GYAROLE is being implemented to aid staff in identifying constituent roles such as active student, active employee, inactive student, etc. to aid in administering the “name change” process.
  
  
• Millenium legacy records will be loaded into the Banner SPRIDEN tables to cross reference Millenium information to Banner records to aid in the transition.  This is the same process that was used to transition from the PLUS system to Banner for the other modules.  Once these cross reference records are no longer required, they will be removed.
  
  
• Banner users across the campus that do searches involving names and addresses will see more records appear for some names due to the additional donor names being loaded into the data base.

The timing for this go live event was chosen to optimize several factors.  First, going live with Advancement is being done on a month-end boundary to minimize the operational processing impact.  To delay this further would run into the fiscal year end processing required by the finance organization participants.  In addition, the academic calendar was considered to avoid heavy registration times and be fully migrated before the new fall term activity begins.  While implementing new systems is never an easy scheduling task, we believe this window minimized the campus impact to the degree possible.