Introduction:
At times, you may have a large amount of duplicate contact records within your CharityEngine account. Duplicate contact records can occur for a number of reasons, primarily from importing contact information, receiving form submissions, and from manual data entry. It's important to keep your data clean and minimize the amount of duplicate records within your account so that your fundraising efforts are not affected. To reduce the
Instructions:
To utilize the De-Dupe People feature within CharityEngine, navigate to the Automation & Workflow Application. Locate the Contacts section and then select De-Dupe People.
On the De-Dupe People listing screen, you will notice default filters in place to assist in locating any recently created duplicate contact records.
These filters can be updated by using the
The filters that can be updated are First Name, Last Name, the date range that the contacts were imported, when the contacts were modified, what criteria
The compare mode filter allows you to select certain criteria to compare the contacts to. The compare mode allows you to narrow or widen the comparisons using the criteria in the
For example, if Name Only is selected as the criteria, CharityEngine will compare all contacts that have the same name, regardless if they have other information that does not match such as email or address.
Selecting a more specific filter will result in finding contacts that closer match, but still may have
Additionally, there are two toggles on the side to leave the name fields blank. If the toggle is set to yes, the search will include people without names, and will only look for the other criteria selected. For example, if you are looking for contacts that live in the same household but have different names, the toggle would need to be set to yes to match all contacts with the same address.
If names are entered in the field, ensure that the toggle is on no and the system will now search for the names as well as any other filters that you have selected.
Filters can also be updated by using the three normal filters Owner, Status, and Dates.
Once duplicate contacts have been found, check the Merge box for the contacts you want to merge
Once contacts have been selected, you will be able to click on the drop-down and the
Select the Master Record from the drop down that will be used as the contact in the database and click the merge button to merge the contacts.
Note: The contact ID will be in sequential order of when they were entered into the database. Using the example above, the contact ID 10052138 was in the database first and 22557329 was entered second.
Outcome:
FAQ and Further Reading:
Q. Is there an alternative way to de-duping contact records?
A. You do have the option to merge duplicate contact records directly when viewing a contact record.
Q. There are duplicate contact records in my database that are not appearing within the De-Dupe People section. Is there an alternative way to merging?
A. Yes, you can merge contact records that are not displaying in the De-Dupe People section by following the instructions within this article: Merge Contacts
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