Mass Merge Utility Tips

Sunshine Reinken Watson · July 2016

We were given the Mass Merge Utility Plug-in free for 90 days with our recent RENXT purchase. Has anyone used this, and do you have any tips or feedback about it? I wasn't given much guidance, but I want to run it at lease once before our 90 days runs out.

Jen Claudy · July 2016

Never heard of this plug-in. Can you ask BB to confirm when the backup of your db happens, and then run this, check your results and if necessary restore your backup? Or can you run the plug in on a query of records where you could find or create a couple of dupes and test the process? I'd be very interested in hearing more about your experience with this plug in...might be something worth looking into for my org, depending on the cost.

Heather Heyd 2 · July 2016

Sunshine Watson:

We were given the Mass Merge Utility Plug-in free for 90 days with our recent RENXT purchase. Has anyone used this, and do you have any tips or feedback about it? I wasn't given much guidance, but I want to run it at lease once before our 90 days runs out.

Hi Sunshine,

We are in the same boat. We received a quick overview from a BB rep and here are some notes from research that I did:

Mass Merge

The Mass Merge plugin is a Raiser's Edge add-in developed by Blackbaud's Professional Services team to help us to more efficiently manage duplicate constituents in our Raiser's Edge database. This plugin is separate, and more advance than, the standard duplicate constituent management tool. We can choose how to use the merge via any of the following ways:

•   “Search my entire database” – This option will use the specified duplicate criteria to search the entire database.

•   “Limit the search to a specific Constituent Query” – This option will search all records in a static query for duplicates.

•   “Import a CSV File for merging” – This option is for advanced users that are able to separately generate a list of records they want to merge.

Matches are determined by a “key” system. The key system opens up the concept of having multiple duplicate detection passes, starting with very strict criteria that requires no manual review to very loose criteria that requires manual review.

For example, say you choose matching criteria of First Name (5 characters must match), Last Name (10 characters must match), Address (5 characters must match) and Zip Code (5 characters must match). For any records that match with this “key” will show up as matching.

Key points:

•   We may run mass merge as much as we’d like during our license term (90 days) and we can merge many records at once (or one by one).

•   Recommended to run after running Address Finder.

•   If there are more than 5,000 duplicates, the tool will limit the merging to the first 5,000 at one time.

•   Other users will not be impacted while the merge is being run; only the user who is performing the merge.

•   Mass merge does not delete the child (duplicate) record. It creates a query so we may globally delete them if desired. It only marks the child record as inactive.

•   Do NOT run this in Supervisor rights – change your rights to be a user otherwise it will fail due to timeouts.

There is a dedicated team to help with this and can be reached at: gmpstechconsulting@blackbaud.com

We haven't run ours yet.

HTH.

Tatyana Leifman · July 2016

In addition to what Heather noted from her research, from personal experience of the plug-in: the plug-in allows to go through the suggested duplicates one by one and approve or remove records from the merge or switch which will be the child and parent record (i.e which record should be merged into which). However, this tagging is not saved, so once you review the proposed duplicates, you need to run the merge immediately. If you exit the plug-in and come back, the duplicates flagged by the plug-in are still preserved as a group but none of the manual review/removal of records from the proposed merge or switching of the parent/child records.

Jennifer Lange · August 2016

Sunshine Watson:

We were given the Mass Merge Utility Plug-in free for 90 days with our recent RENXT purchase. Has anyone used this, and do you have any tips or feedback about it? I wasn't given much guidance, but I want to run it at lease once before our 90 days runs out.

I used the utility with my NXT purchase and I didn't like it - it didn't show me enought about the constituent to make an educated opinion about merging. I'm back to the RE7 merger. I like that best - it shows me the most.

Art Bryman 2 · September 2020

We also got Mass Merge with a 90-day license with our NXT upgrade. It's better than the built-in merge tool, but not as good as Omatic's MergeOmatic.

Here's my problem with it:

1) you can only view 10 fields when comparing dupes

2) can't match by phone numbers, only by email

3) can't view spouse ID, so can't tell if spouse is just relationship, or full constituent record

4) can't view address dates (from, to, last changed)

5) hard to find dupe records when preferred addresses don't match

6) If you choose to delete the merged records, this is what ends up in your Notes:

cac8e4ff452fde9627dfa2b7dfd6a729-huge-20

The one upside is that you can import a CSV list, with Record-to-keep Import ID and Record-to-merge Import ID side-by-side, and this will merge them.

Mass Merge Utility Tips

Comments

Categories