Nonconstituent Spouse Records that have a Constituent Record that isn't linked

Mary Dudley

Does anyone have an idea or solution for this problem I am having?  I have many, many occurrences of this problem explained in the following example:



John Doe is a constituent in the database and has a spouse relationship with (nonconstituent) Jane Doe on his record.  Jane Doe also has an existing constituent record that is not linked to John's record.



I need to find all occurrences of this and link them so that the two constituent records are linked as spouses replacing the nonconstituent relationships.



I found solution ID: BB713888 in Blackbaud's Knowledgebase, but it does not seem to be working for me. 

JoAnn Strommen

The solution looks like it's a bit of work to do but the scenario of what it will do sounds like just what you're looking for.  What doesn't seem to be working for you?

Nicole S

Not sure if this will help, but there is a plug in called the nonconstituent merge utility that I have used in the past, but I think it only works with nonconstituents.



I will have to try the KB solution.  This is a problem for a lot of orgs including mine.  (Oh to inherit a messy database...)

Susan Ross

Hi Mary -- Susan from Blackbaud here :-)



I am sorry you have a lot of these kinds of duplicates, I know how tricky they can be! 



I think there are two issues, one is identifying  the relationship-constituent duplicates, and the other is fixing them.  I actually think the first part is the trickiest.



The knowledgebase solution you found should work.



You also could try going through Step 1 and Step 2 in the Knowledgebase solution to export all the Non-Constituent Relationships and Constituents to Excel.  Then you can combine those files and use the “Find Duplicates” tool in Excel to identify the duplicates for you.  This will give you an idea of how many there are.  Maybe (hopefully!) there are not as many as you think.  If your database is huge, you could start with a key constituency and only export people with certain constituent codes.  That might not find all of them, but it is a start.



Then for fixing them, I personally would feel most comfortable fixing them one by one.  It is more work, but that way you can be extra sure that they are indeed the same person.  I might be married to Bob Smith, and Bob Smith might have a constituent record, but it may or may not be the same Bob Smith.



Then lastly, for prevention, I would definitely recommend you make sure everyone at your organization knows to search first before creating new relationships.  Also, you could check in Configuration > Business Rules > Duplicates > and make sure all the boxes are checked to search for duplicates when editing/adding a Spouse or a Relationship.  That will help with prevention as well. 



Good luck fixing these up!  Let me know if you have any questions about anything here!



Susan

 

Mary Dudley

Thank you everyone for your responses.  I think I will try again with the Knowledgebase solution and see if I can get it to work.  I think I was having issues when importing because it found an exception for all of the records but some were because some fields which are required were not in the file.  So I will try again



 

Jeffrey Montgomery

Hi Mary,



You can scan your entire database for duplicates (including non-constituents) for free with MergeOmatic, the duplicate constituent solution for the Raiser's Edge. You can download the plugin here (no registration required). It will find your duplicates, score them by similarity (a match confidence score), show you visualizations (see below) on the number of duplicates distributed by confidence score, and even visualize which users have created the duplicates over time. For merging (it comes with 50 free merges) it calculates which record should remain based on user-defined rules, and lets you quickly review and batch-merge them (or to do it individually if you like). Let us know what you find!









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Jeffrey Montgomery

Founder, Omatic Software

 



Phone: 888.662.8426 x705  |  JeffM@omaticsoftware.com  |  OmaticSoftware.com

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