Multiple CONS IDs associated with the same email

Jenny Lin

Hi there,


I'm working on a Teamraiser event where participants are using the same email address to sign up multiple people who are participating in the event. As a result, on the backend we have multiple CONS IDs associated with the same email. This creates a huge problem when we send out emails to these constituents as Luminate Online recognizes each CONS ID as different constituents, but the same email is being sent to an inbox multiple times.


Do you know any best practices or suppression filters that can be applied to prevent sending duplicate emails to the same constituent?


Thanks in advance,

Jenny

Patti Posey

Jenny Lin:

Hi there,


I'm working on a Teamraiser event where participants are using the same email address to sign up multiple people who are participating in the event. As a result, on the backend we have multiple CONS IDs associated with the same email. This creates a huge problem when we send out emails to these constituents as Luminate Online recognizes each CONS ID as different constituents, but the same email is being sent to an inbox multiple times.


Do you know any best practices or suppression filters that can be applied to prevent sending duplicate emails to the same constituent?


Thanks in advance,

Jenny

Jenny,


You are gonna having bigger issues than multiple emails!  This has been a major issues for us in the past four years.  So bad that this year we turned off multiple registration.  What we found were people trying to reset passwords but weren't getting the emails because someone else had their email on the record too.  The also started to copy over records because they thought it was their record but was actually someone elses with the duplicate email.  It's a total nightmare.  We just wrapped up our event.  For each registration that came down in the connector, I was checking to see if the records matched.  If they didn't I had to go to luminate and change the record back to the original person.  Then had to unlink and link to correct record in Raiser's Edge.  If you contact support, they can help you configure your site to not allow duplicate emails.


Good Luck!

Patti Posey

Stamford Hospital Foundation

Brian Mucha

Our position on this is basically what BB took. You are leaving it to the constituent to decide. If they create three different records using the same email address, then they are asking for three copies of your emails. Just be sure to personalize them with names, so the recipient understands what's happening. They are then free to unsubscribe as they see fit.


This might seem dumb when you are used to MailChimp, but Luminate email can do a lot more than just send everyone the same content. Personalization can (maybe even should) extend beyond the "Dear Jenny". Consider how you might adjust the intro wording a tiny bit for a donor vs a non-donor. "As a recent donor you know the value..." or "New donors receive a..."


There's a ton you can do with conditionals and all your valuable biographical data that makes the recipient feel like you know who they are, which is great - and then the duplicate emails seem less redundant too.


For us those duplicate email uses are mostly for parents and their kids, so you might put the Youth participant types in a separate group and use that as a Do Not Send group for solicitations and such. You can do that automatically in the TR settings.



> What we found were people trying to reset passwords but weren't getting the emails because someone else had their email on the record too.


I think this isn't quite right. Say I register myself and my kid Quinn using my email address. Later I want to recover Quinn's password, so I enter my email in the recover password form. I do get that email, but the system sends me the link for the first record it encounters using that address...which is mine. So it's impossible for me to recover Quinn's password without calling.


If I recall, this issue was fixed about a year ago. I believe now you get an email with reset links to ALL the accounts using that email address, rather than just the first one found.



> The also started to copy over records because they thought it was their record but was actually someone elses with the duplicate email


I'm not sure I understand this one.


EDIT: I wonder if this is a different issue that we've noticed. We frequently get a registration or some other update that overwrites old biographical data with completely different data. What's happening here is that users are sharing a computer, and the "Remember Me" cookie is keeping the last user logged in. So the next user sees the form prefilled and just overwrites the old stuff rather than logging off. Of course shared machines are likely to happen at home, which is also common with shared email addresses. But the email address isn't the actual cause, its the shared machine and the cookie login.

 

Patti Posey

Brian,

"What we found were people trying to reset passwords but weren't getting the emails because someone else had their email on the record too" 

This issue has not been resolved.  When we were using multiple registration, team captains were registering all their friend using one email address.  So now when she goes to register this year and requests a password reset, it send a link to her but it's not her record, it's one of her friends she registered.  I have had over 100 people that came down in the RE/LO connector whose record was link to someone else because of the same emails.  I've had to first go in to luminate and open the record who it's supposed to be link to in RE.  I would scroll down to the salutation and see that it did not match the name above.  So somehow they copied over the person's name, but thankfully it does not change the salutations so I was able to find out whose record it really was.  So I would change the Luminate record back to the correct person.  Then go back to RE/LO and unlink the records and relink to the correct one in RE.  Thankfully I made screen shots from both Luminate and the connector for BB to see.  I'm not talking a few records either.  In one week, I had to  untangle almost 100 records,  along with the phone calls that people couldn't retrieve their passwords, etc.  It was such a nightmare this year.  So we turned off multiple registration and do not allow duplicate emails.  It will take some time to clean up all the duplicate emails, but it is the only way I know to resolve this issue or until Blackbaud comes up with a better way to register a family with young children (like you were able to do in Sphere). 


I'm attached a LO record that shows the name of someone who is using someone else's record.  Look at the name and then the salutation.  Also attached is a record from RE/LO where the records are not the same person but it's linked to it.  In some cases, they didn't even have the same email address!


Patti Posey

Stamford Hospital Foundation.


 

Brian Mucha

This sounds like a RELO problem to me. We have participants do this all the time and the records don't get crossed this way. (We use Omatic. Has anyone heard anything positive about RELO?)


I'd look at the interactions in LO on the messed up record to track the course of events. Go to the Interactions tab on that cons record, click the Show All button and sort by date. 


You should see an interaction that lists all the initial biographical values, and then later interactions when those values change. The update interaction even shows the old and new values, and who made the change. Those updates could be user edits, admin edits or DataSync changes.


If RELO really is getting confused over email addresses that's just unforgivable, email has not been a unique identifier for a decade.