Duplicate Constituent Management Tool

Yvette Elkins

Hello, does anyone use the "Duplicate Constituent Management Tool" in Admin?  We have RE7 7.96.  We have over 11,000  possible duplicate records to clean up and I was checking to see if anyone knew of a quicker way of cleaning up duplicates from the database.  Thanks, Yvette

Sarah Bodem

Yvette Elkins:

Hello, does anyone use the "Duplicate Constituent Management Tool" in Admin?  We have RE7 7.96.  We have over 11,000  possible duplicate records to clean up and I was checking to see if anyone knew of a quicker way of cleaning up duplicates from the database.  Thanks, Yvette

Hi Yvette,


I have used it quite a bit, but i wouldn't say it's terribly user-friendly, and we only usually have 400 or so at any time so its not overwhelming. 


With that many dupes, i might export them into excel. that way you can sort them and it's easier to look through (in my opinion). then, theoretically you could separate the redundant ones and do a global delete

Shakhawat Patwary 3

Yvette Elkins:

Hello, does anyone use the "Duplicate Constituent Management Tool" in Admin?  We have RE7 7.96.  We have over 11,000  possible duplicate records to clean up and I was checking to see if anyone knew of a quicker way of cleaning up duplicates from the database.  Thanks, Yvette

Hi Yvette, Are you locally hosted or hosted by Blackbaud? We are hosted by Blackbaud and we could not make "Duplicate Constituent Management Tool"  work for us. Blackbaud is working on this to fix.

Yvette Elkins

We are locally hosted.  Thanks! Y

Yvette Elkins

Sarah Bodem:

Yvette Elkins:

Hello, does anyone use the "Duplicate Constituent Management Tool" in Admin?  We have RE7 7.96.  We have over 11,000  possible duplicate records to clean up and I was checking to see if anyone knew of a quicker way of cleaning up duplicates from the database.  Thanks, Yvette

Hi Yvette,


I have used it quite a bit, but i wouldn't say it's terribly user-friendly, and we only usually have 400 or so at any time so its not overwhelming. 


With that many dupes, i might export them into excel. that way you can sort them and it's easier to look through (in my opinion). then, theoretically you could separate the redundant ones and do a global delete

Thank you for the info.  Unfortunately we are unable to delete these records as they all have gifts.  Appreciate your quick response.  Yvette

 

Jennifer Lucarelli

Hi there. I use this tool on a very regular basis. It is tedious in the beginning when you have so many, but if you comitt to a set amount of time each week, and always mark the ones who are definitely NOT a duplicate as such, it gets easier and more manageable in a very short period of time. Now I use it about once per quarter just to stay ahead of the game.

Cathleen Mai

You might want to look into MergeOmatic by Appomatic.


http://omatic-mergeomatic.helpdocsonline.com/mergeomatic

 

Heather MacKenzie

Yvette Elkins:

Hello, does anyone use the "Duplicate Constituent Management Tool" in Admin?  We have RE7 7.96.  We have over 11,000  possible duplicate records to clean up and I was checking to see if anyone knew of a quicker way of cleaning up duplicates from the database.  Thanks, Yvette

I use the tool to generate the report and then look through it manually.  It's a bit of a slog at the moment, being around 500 pages long, but clicking the button to mark records as being unique and not duplicates has already helped to slim it down.

Yvette Elkins

Thank you so very much!  Yvette

Annelise Holverstott 2

There is a Mass Merge plug-in that you can subscribe to, but its main advantage is just that it will merge a big group all at once instead of going record by record. Unfortunately, it doesn't relieve you from having to look at each pair of records to determine whether they should be merged or not, and it actually shows less constituent information in its preview window than the Duplicate Constituent Management tool. One thing I did like about it is that I was able to search for records that match on email address only, which you can't do in the Duplicate Management Tool. I also like that it added an attribute to the merged records so they're easy to identify. 


This sounds like counter-intuitive advice, but it might actually be helpful to do some other data clean-up first, like running AddressFinder or DeceasedFinder, to either reduce the number of dups to resolve in the first place or to make it easier for you to quickly determine that they're the same person. I also went through our database and actually deleted a number of records that had only a name--no contact info, no gifts, no actions, etc. Generally, I agree with what others have said--it's overwhelming and tedious, especially at first, but if you just make a start and then fit it into your routine, you'll start to see progress pretty quickly.