Introduction
To help promote good data hygiene, tributes should be frequently cleaned up by identifying duplicate tributes and merging them into one tribute that contains all the transaction data. Duplicated tributes can easily be created when donors make a tribute donation due to a new tribute being created with every donation.
To eliminate duplicate tributes, you will first need to create a query to identify the duplicates, then choose a master tribute to merge all of the other tribute data to, import the data to update the tribute records, and finally deactivate the merged tributes.
Table of Contents
Instructions
Step 1: To create the query, navigate to the Automation & Workflow App > General > Queries > Create New and select Filter: Donations click Select: Tribute.
Step 2: Within the Select area, click/move the Source Transaction Id, the Tribute Id, and Tribute Name. These fields will make it easy to identify duplicate tributes and select a master tribute.
Note: by clicking on the field box, you can rename the field for easier identification.
Step 3: If you do not add a filter, all tributes that live in your database will be pulled into the report. If you are cleaning up your tributes on a regular basis, you could add a date created filter to filter only tributes created within that time frame.
Step 4: Click RUN and then click Export using the icon to export to excel.
Note: It is important to note that the Acknowledgee data will not populate and update if you do not use the Tribute Acknowledgee query, as there is no field for tribute acknowledgee in the tribute query. If you want Acknowledgee data to merge with the transaction data you will need to create a separate query, then suppress the list of tributes that appeared in the tribute acknowledgee query to prevent duplicate work.
You will first need to create the tribute acknowledgee query, if you need assistance with doing this read this article, then suppress all of the contacts that are in that query by adding a filter to only show tributes that are not listed in the original query.
Step 5: Once in Excel, filter the data to sort by Tribute Name to find all the duplicates.
As you can see in the data above, there are multiple transactions that have the same tribute name and need to be merged into the singular tribute instead of several.
You will need to decide which tribute will be the master tribute and make a list of all the other Id’s. This separate list will be used to deactivate the old tribute records in a second import. Once the list is made change the Id of all of the other duplicates to that Id (the master tribute ID).
Step 6: Once the list is made change the Id of all of the other duplicates to that Id. As you can see below all of the tribute Ids have been changed to 1424029. This will ensure that all of the transaction data will be attribute to the tribute.
Step 7: Now that the spreadsheet has been manipulated, navigate to Automation & Workflow > General > Import & Export and select Import.
Step 8: Import to:Tributes. Click NEXT.
Step 9: Click on add Fields and add Transaction Id, Tribute Id, and Tribute Name as fields in the import to match the fields in your excel sheet.
Step 10: Upload your file and finish the import.
Step 11: Once the import has processed, navigate to the Tribute listing screen and search for the tribute Id. On the Transaction tab, you will now see that transactions have been attributed to the tribute.
Step 12: The last step is deactivating the tribute Id’s that these transactions were originally associated with. Navigate to Automation & Workflow > General > Import & Export > Create New > Import and select tributes as the import to, just as you did in the first import. Add Tribute Id and Active as fields for the import. To make them inactive add 0 in your excel spreadsheet under the ‘Active’ column.
Step 13: Upload the list of tribute Ids and finish the import.
Step 14: Once the import job process, all of the tributes will become deactivated.
FAQs & Additional Reading
Q. How do I clean up tributes with Acknowledgees?
A. Read more in our article here: How to Clean Up Tributes with Acknowledgees
