Schools in Global Link

From AFSWiki

Background

One of the keys to much of what AFS does is maintaining relationships with schools - both those that host our students and from which our outbound students come. Thus, besides information on families, students, and volunteers in Global Link, it is also important that we have solid data about these schools.

Over the past three months a cross-functional team of staff and volunteers have been working at cleaning up the school data in Global Link. This data has been sourced from OPUS (where it was inaccessible to the volunteers) as well as various spreadsheets that were maintained by staff about school contacts, etc. But, lacking visibility by the volunteers (who are the key knowledge base and contacts with the schools), and without a focus on keeping the data "clean", over the years we had accumulated many duplicate records, there was missing information, etc. The focus of these past months has been on cleaning up this data so that it can be useful to both staff and volunteers as we move forward. Specifically, the following tasks were identified:

• Cleaning up state/zipcodes (Complete - almost 3000 missing/inconsistent ones)
• Elimination of duplicate records for the same school (Complete - 4500+ duplicates out of 17,000 school records were eliminated)
• Establishing rules for school names (see School Names for rules on how we will keep consistency in the future) and correcting ones which did not conform to the rules (Complete - 1400+ corrections out of 12,000+)
• Crossreferencing contact spreadsheets with GL (WIP - 11,000 contact records added to GL)
• Correctly linking schools to the Team or Chapter which supports this school (Complete - automated fix)

Now that most of this massive cleanup work has been done (several meetings, 50+ hours of intensive data manipulation, several days of IT database work for extractions, loads, updates), we will need the assistance of all the AFS volunteers who work with our schools:

• Please cooperate with the volunteer development staff in linking the schools to the team or chapter which supports the school
• Help us identify schools which are missing from GL but with which we have a relationship
• If you have other, likely more up-to-date, data about the schools you work with and the contact information for these schools, help us put this data into GL so that we can have a single-source of this important data

The School Cleanup Team

• AFS IT Staff - Julie Baker, Meryl Lewis, Rita Shah
• IT Advisory Group - Al Russell, Francesca Lippi, Rich Senften
• AFS Functional Staff - Ann Steffen, Anna Sharp-Whitcomb, Ashley Collins, Chan MacDonald, Joanne Yokoyama-Martin, Lila Pigott, Phil Gordon

Rules for entering new schools

While most of the fields in the school record are pretty self-explanatory, the current version of the user interface does not do much error checking. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the individual adding the record to make sure that correct data is entered. The following rules should be followed:

• Ensure that we do not create duplicate records - before adding a new school, do a search to see if it is already there or not. A quick was is to use the state and zip code fields in the search screen to look for it.
• Make sure that you use the full legal name of the school - see School Names for the rules for entering school names
• Ensure that the state (2 letter abbreviation) and zip codes are entered
• Put the appropriate data in the Region, Team, and Chapter fields. Right now these fields are not "linked", so you must enter them individually.
  • The region field should be the hosting gateway region - should always be entered
  • The team and chapter fields should be entered as follows:
    • School supported by an affiliated chapters - enter both AT and chapter
    • School supported by an unaffiliate chapter - leave AT blank, enter chapter only
    • School supported by an team, but not a specific chartered chapter - enter team only, leave chapter blank
    • School not supported by an team or chapter - leave both blank
  • Note that GL will only allow you to choose teams/chapters which are properly chartered
• Except for the address and phone number information, most of the rest of the field are optional
• In the Additional Data field you may put such things as the school policies for hosting/sending, e.g. whether the school accepts graduates, etc.

Rules for correcting existing school data

As noted above, the school data in Global Link was sourced from OPUS - a system that was in accessible to volunteers - and it was not well maintained. Therefore, there this is the first opportunity for volunteers to both see and to correct the data. While we have attempted to automatically clean up most of it, there are still a number of things which we cannot automate. In particular, the following kinds of situation may be found which can be cleaned up manually:

• School address is incorrect/inconsistent - possibly right zip code but wrong state code
  • Correct the incorrect data
• School is assigned to the wrong region/Team/chapter
  • Use above rules for entering correct date - this may mean fixing all three fields separately
  • As above, note that you may only choose chartered team/chapters. One of the options is to select a "blank" team/Chapter
  • If you notice a school which is improperly assigned to your team/chapter, and you are not sure which team/Chapter it should be assigned to, do not just "guess" - instead notify the Global Link Help Desk so others may make the proper change. The Help Desk will work with the volunteer development staff to assign the proper team/chapter.