Profiles and Directory
The following documentation is written to introduce you to the overhauled services currently available for testing in your QA environment. Please review and prepare your adjustments as soon as possible.
What's New? (2021 Release)
So much has been improved, some of it visible to constituents but most of it under the surface to make management a whole lot easier.
Cleaner profile maintenance - As profile contents grew, the monolithic "edit everything on one page" approach failed to scale. We reworked the entire UI to make it easier to find and update information.
Directory Accuracy - Contact information in the directory is now entirely driven from the warehouse, solving once and for all the 'stale profile' situation.
Profile Flexibility - You can now set up your own fields on profiles to capture institution-specific data.
Simplified contact update sync - new API endpoints (with complimentary quick CSV exports) of contact updates accommodate less integrated institutions more easily.
Data Standards - states/provinces and countries are now locked in to the ISO3166-2 and all phone numbers are returned in e.164 format.
Standardized Sync - have a new pool of data you want maintained by constituents via profiles? Loopbacks have been standardized to simplify integration.
The most significant difference
The warehouse is everything. We no longer override warehouse data with whatever we have on the constituent's profile, because nowhere near enough of them were kept up to date. Changes will still be captured and forwarded (in far more logical fashion), but it will take slightly longer for those changes to surface in the directory.
Integration Updates
Meaningful Formatting Differences
stateiso and countryiso - anytime you see ISO on a field, this means we're emitting the ISO-3166 2-character code. We strongly recommend you embrace an ISO standard for this information internally. Your own institutional values are being returned in the original state/country fields, provided you've worked out a mapping between that and the corresponding ISO value.
phone numbers - always e.164 formatted to convey the dial code, area code, and local number in consistent fashion. We're not returning these broken out as nested objects anymore.
Profile Deprecations
mentoravailableuntil, internship flag, internship details, externship flag, externship details (optionally replaced by: new custom field definitions if/as needed)
linkedIn_id, linkedIn_PhotoUrl (no replacement due to LinkedIn API restrictions; these have been gone from edits for two years)
sectorcode, industrycode, occupation, occupation_specialty, careerspecialties (optionally replaced by: new custom field definitions)
Profile Additions
pronouns
homestreet1-3,city,state,stateiso,zip,country,countryiso
workstreet1-3,city,state,stateiso,zip,country,countryiso
mobilephoneconsent - a flag indicating the constituent's consent for you to text them
homeemailaddress - collection and forwarding only; prefemailaddress remains the principal one used for profile/directory operations
workemailaddress
Profile Modifications
homephonenumber - e.164 format returned exclusively
mobilephonenumber - e.164 format returned exclusively
workphonenumber - e.164 format returned exclusively
API
/directory/updates will no longer contain full details of changes. One representative field per block (identity, home address, work address, and networking) will be included to suggest you pull that block of updates. Transition to the new resources is required - the old API resource for changes is not going to include every field anymore. It was entirely too vertical of a feed -- the new ones are vastly simpler to work with.
Instead of using directory/updates, use these new ones: /sync/identity-change, /sync/address-change/home, /sync/address-change/work, /profile/changes/networking, and /profile/changes/custom endpoints can be queried by date range to give you molecules of each (always with xid included); no more pulling entire profiles for a simple address update!
Consult your API dashboard (/api/v1) for the resource definitions and sample payloads for each of the three new resources. This should significantly aid your integration updates. Generating sufficient sample data by impersonating various constituents (in QA, of course) is strongly recommended as well.
Regarding /sync/address-change/home
AlumnIQ will be dropping address updates into this feed that originated in other modules of AlumnIQ. This means that a materially different home address captured via the giving module will result in a change record landing in this feed. Ditto memberships, events, and signature event registrations. No longer will we have to incur processing delays for contact info updates attached to transactional activity!
General Overview
There are three components of the AlumnIQ profile and directory service:
A data warehouse - as provided by you, that contains contact information and related bits for your constituents;
A profile - what a constituent actually logs in to and updates;
The directory - where a certain subset of your constituents are listed, and a likely slightly larger subset of your constituents can search for them
A constituent logs in using their profile to see what's in the warehouse, provide updates to their profile that will update their directory listing, and seeks connection with others through the directory. The more correct and consistent these are, the better everyone's experience.
As a result, these are three legs of the same stool:
The warehouse is what you believe the truth to be about a person;
The profile is what they're telling you the truth is or should be;
The directory is what they want the (limited) world to know about them.
We worked hard to build tools to facilitate moving the truth back to your institution as fast as technically feasible while still providing a great experience to your constituents.
The New Profile (View)
Each section is individually editable. And custom sections per client are easily configured and deployed so you can capture and manage whatever warehouse-based data you need to!
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