Tracking school-specific data in LGL

In this article:

LGL tracks class-year affiliations for your schools’ students, parents, and grandparents and makes it easy to generate class lists and manage alumni.

Turn on school settings in your LGL account

To turn on school settings in your LGL account, navigate to Settings > Subscription settings > General.

Then scroll down the page and select the "Display school/alumni-specific settings" checkbox in the School Settings section.

Class years and class affiliation types

To assign a class year to a constituent record, you must also assign a class affiliation “type”. Your LGL account comes preloaded with the following default Class Affiliation types: "Student", "Parent", and "Grandparent". The most common Class Affiliation type is "Student", which represents those who attend/attended your school. Class affiliation types such as "Parent" or "Grandparent" can be used to associate those constituents with their child or grandchild’s class year.

It is possible to assign more than one class-year affiliation for a constituent (i.e., a parent who has multiple children at the school or an alumni who also is a parent, etc.).

Additional class-year affiliation types can be added by going to Settings > Menu Items > Class year affiliations and clicking the + Add values button.

The year you use in your class-year designation should represent the graduation year (or anticipated graduation year). This is an efficient way to keep your affiliations accurately tracked as the student moves through the grades in your school. It also allows you to avoid needing to transition a constituent from "Current Student" to "Alumni". The class year assigned to them will identify whether they are a current student or an alumnus.

Assign class-year affiliations to constituents

From the Constituent Details page, you can assign constituents to a class-affiliation type and year by clicking the + Add Affiliations or Edit Affiliations button within the Related Information section:

Now you can choose the appropriate class-year affiliation type from the dropdown menu and add the four-digit class year. The year is a required field and must be completed for you to be able to save the entry.

Class-year data at a glance

In the Related Information section of the constituent record, you will see the class-year affiliation types and years that the constituent has assigned to them. This is also viewable in the abbreviated constituent record in the All constituents view:

Create lists, send mailings, and build reports

You can query for constituents based on their class affiliation and/or year. And then you can either create and save a list, begin a mailing to the result set, or export your results if you want a spreadsheet. 

In the example below, our query selects the students who were members of the classes of 1960 to 1990. We click Search, and LGL displays the 20 constituents meeting our criteria. From here we can: 

  • Save the search results as a list by choosing the Select 20 button and then the Save selected button
  • Send a mailing to this group by clicking the Send mail button
  • Export the results to a report by clicking the Export results button

Class-year affiliation type merge fields available for use in mailing or email templates

It is possible to include student graduation years as merge fields in a mailing or email. Here are the merge fields you can use (they are also accessible in the Merge Field Reference in your account):

  • [[class_year.Student.short]] for the student's 2-digit class-year affiliation
  • [[class_year.Student.full]] for the student's 4-digit class-year affiliation

Bulk add class-year affiliations

If you want to add class-year affiliations in bulk, you can accomplish this using the Flex Importer, following the steps in the Mapping class-year fields help article.

NOTE: This process cannot be completed using a constituent bulk update.

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