What are the best practices for resolving duplicates in Convio?

When you start syncing with an external database, you will often find that, when you go to resolve duplicates, you have a lot of unresolved issues.

The best thing to do here is to work through the potential duplicates as you have time. In fact, the act of sending out an email to everyone will give you an accurate "status" (ie good or bad) for each email address and that is crucial info to have to decide if you have two records that are obvious duplicates with different email addresses which one to keep (the good one if one is good and one is bad obviously ).

As far as resolving goes, pretty much anything with a score of 60 or above is a duplicate. If you start resolving in descending match score order, it'll be pretty obvious that most things in the 60s and above are real duplicates/matches to your offline database, and once you get below that (e.g. into the 40s) that maybe 1 in 10 might be a match. There's no hard and fast rule though - the importance of the score is more to rank different matches when there is more than one potential.

A couple of key points to remember:

An "online" match is a match w/ another Convio record w/ an email address.

An "offline" match is a match w/ shadow file w/ out an email address.

- Resolve -

This basically says that you are done with this record. You want to save it as it looks now, remove any outstanding potential matches from the list of potential matches for this record, and move on to the next record with potential matches. This is ALWAYS the last button you will press on the resolution screen.

- Match -

Only available as an option for offline matches, think of this as cue to assign the offline database ID number to this record.

- Ignore -

This basically says that you know that this match is not a duplicate, so you are telling the system not to show this as a duplicate again. I would advise using caution with this one unless you are sure, as once you mark a record as ignored, it will not show up ever again as a duplicate unless you talk to support.

- Skip -

"Hmm, I'm not sure what do do about this one. I probably need to ask Convio support or do some investigation in my offline database to help me make a decision. Please leave it in the list for now, and I'll come back to it some other time. Move on to the next record".