The problem
Banner is the system of record for this university. Every student’s enrollment status, program, and academic history lives there first. Event and conference registration through Swoogo was a separate motion entirely, and every registration that mattered academically — a mandatory orientation session, a credit-bearing workshop — had to eventually show up in Banner too. Someone was doing that by hand, matching names, checking IDs, keying updates in after the fact.
The approach / solution
- Built a direct sync between this client’s Swoogo registration data and Banner, so registration activity reaches the student information system without a manual export step.
- Added per-student custom field mapping tuned to this institution’s own registration schema — student ID, program, and cohort fields specific to how this university structures its data — so a record lines up correctly on the Banner side instead of arriving as a flat, generic import.
- Runs on the client’s own isolated PostgreSQL database, one of five separate tenant databases on the platform.
- Built purely against documented REST endpoints on both the Swoogo and Banner sides. No screen-scraping, no browser automation standing in for a missing API.
Outcome / result
Registration activity from this client’s Swoogo account reaches Banner on its own now. The per-student field mapping is what makes that useful rather than just present — a record that lands with the wrong program code or a missing cohort tag isn’t actually synced, it’s just noise in someone else’s system of record. This same mapping layer also feeds the client’s MS Dynamics CRM sync, covered in a sibling case study.
Why it matters for enterprise event-tech
Banner isn’t a system most event-tech integration work ever touches. Building a sync that respects an institution’s own field structure, instead of dumping registration data in as a loose CSV-shaped blob, is what separates a real SIS integration from a basic export job. It’s also a clear sign that Swoogo-integration depth reaches into higher-education, compliance-aware territory beyond conferences and associations.
