Overview
With the Blackbaud integration, you can eliminate the hassle of double-handling data between two systems. Blackbaud will manage core information fields within Orah so any updates made within Blackbaud will reflect in Orah upon your next automatic or manual sync. This will help ensure your data is consistent and accurate across the board.
What data can you sync?
Orah is capable of syncing your most relevant pupil information from Blackbaud. See below for the exact information that can be integrated.
Pupil Information:
First name
Last name
Student Reference ID
Email
Home Phone
Sex
Date of Birth
Grade Level
Profile Picture
House (Dorm) Assignment
Contact information:
First name
Last name
Relationship
Phone
Email
Address
Houses:
House (Dorm) names
Actions:
Create
Edit
Delete
Enabling
To be able to integrate with Orah, your first step will be to confirm with your CSM that you would like to move forward with the Blackbaud integration and tell the CSM whether you would like to include all students or just boarding students in the sync. If you are unsure of who your CSM is, please contact support@orah.com to submit an integration request.
Your CSM will then reach out to a Blackbaud representative who will initiate the integration and generate a Key and Secret for the account to be used for authentication purposes. The Blackbaud representative will then securely message the Key and Secret, along with the API URL for the school to the CSM.
The Orah CSM will then go into the Integrations panel in your Orah account to populate the API URL, the API Username (Key), API Password (Secret), and will flip the day student toggle if you want to include the full student body.
When the CSM clicks "Enable Integration", the first sync will occur.
How it works
By enabling this integration, your Blackbaud API credentials will be authenticated and saved to our Orah database. An initial sync will take place to import all students from your Blackbaud database and merge any existing students in the Orah database.
Managing your data
Syncing your data
You can set the automatic sync to occur once every 24 hours (generally overnight) or alternatively, you can perform a manual sync with a single click which will sync your student information instantly.
Existing students
If you already have students in your Orah account, we do our best to automatically link existing students via individual matching references from within Orah and Blackbaud. If we are unable to match your students, you will find these students are listed on the debugger page where you can search and match these students.
Deleting students
As Blackbaud will manage your core information, you will need to mark a student as inactive in Blackbaud in order to remove them from your Orah account. We offer the option of deleting students, which will permanently remove all records associated with this student, or a deactivate option which will archive their records. The deactivate option is applied by default.
Troubleshooting
No students importing?
If your automatic sync no longer appears to be functioning, it is likely that you need to generate a new Key and Secret for your Blackbaud account to re-authenticate the integration. Blackbaud has created a help article from their Knowledge Base, which will outline the process.
Note: The Blackbaud article has not been recently updated and refers to Orah as Boardingware. While the name has changed, everything else will be the same.