Duplicate Records being created in Online Express

Valerie Day 2

When we have a guest register for an event, it is automatically creating a duplicate record.  For instance, if Robert Smith registers online as Bob Smith - it does not recognize Robert Smith as the record.  It then creates a new record Bob Smith.  How do we avoid this?

Rob Crenshaw 2

Valerie Day:

When we have a guest register for an event, it is automatically creating a duplicate record.  For instance, if Robert Smith registers online as Bob Smith - it does not recognize Robert Smith as the record.  It then creates a new record Bob Smith.  How do we avoid this?

This is likely happening because you are allowing the OLX plug-in to automatically search for existing donors and create new donor profiles when processing the online donations, instead of doing a manual look-up for existing records. In the Online Express plug-in, you can find and link new donations to existing constituent records via the "Find Constituent" button. De-select the search fields that don't match (i.e., first name in Bob's case) so RE will display the correct record, and then link them up. Also make sure to uncheck the "Exact match only" checkbox in the search screen, as 99.9% of the time the data won't be an exact match to what someone enters on the online form.


Once you've matched up the records, if you're using bulk processing, make sure to click the Options tab and de-select "Attempt auto-match to an existing record" AND "Create new RE record automatically." I always also select the "Reject profile information" option, as our standard practice is to manually review and match each donation record, precisely because the auto-match will end up creating a LOT of duplicates. Hope this helps!