Duplicate emails to parents

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Kathleen Morton
Kathleen Morton ✭
Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
I am wondering if anyone else has this problem. We have parents who use the same email address, but not all our parents do. In a query for one of our email newsletters, we send it out to all parents. In some cases, parents who share an email address, get two emails. I would think that BBNC would be smart enough to filter out duplicate email addresses.



A way around is for me to remove an email from one of the parent records, but I don't really want to do that because sometimes we email just the mom or dad for things and so then I would lose communication with that one parent.



Any recommendations to avoid this problem?
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Comments

  • Karen Badham
    Karen Badham ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 3 Photogenic
    Hello Kathleen,



    For query based lists NetCommunity deduplicates based on record, not based on email address. This is why you're having the results that you are.



    Thanks!


    Karen
  • Kathleen Morton
    Kathleen Morton ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
    I understand that's what happening, but thank you Karen. I was wondering what your recommendation would be to fix this issue as we have some very upset parents and I'm just trying to help them out.
  • Katie tmp
    Katie tmp ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply
    We would also be interested in what the recommended solution is for this problem. We struggle with it quite frequently and always end up having to use an imported list so that we can manually remove duplicates based on email address. However, this greatly limits the customization of our email messages and therefore the "personal" voice that we want to achieve.
  • Karen Badham
    Karen Badham ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 3 Photogenic
    Hey Kathleen and Katie,



    The long term fix is to clean up The Education Edge records. The short term fix is to use an imported list. Imported lists deduplicate based on email address. Here's the steps on those lists. http://www.blackbaud.com/kb/index?pag...



    If you'd like to see this functionality changed, please create an idea to say how you'd like this to work differently.



    Thanks!


    Karen
  • Aaron Boydston
    Aaron Boydston ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
    Keep in mind that there is some logic to the current behavior: if you have John and Joan, separate constituents but with the same email address, merge fields will only work properly with an email for each constituent (dupes). "Dear John..." and "Dear Joan..." If the email had lots of merge fields (eg confirming contact information), this could make a big difference.



    With that said, though, we more often want deduping by email even with constituent-query-based lists. I think the ideal would be an option feature as discussed here:


    http://bbnccommunity.blackbaud.com/bb...
  • Matthew Feltrop
    Matthew Feltrop ✭
    Ninth Anniversary First Reply
    It appears that netCommunity should allow the option to de-dup based on email addresses. It makes no sense to send an email from the same server to the same address more than once.
  • Judy Shafer
    Judy Shafer ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply
    The last Class I took (for $250) on creating and sending emails, the Net Community teacher claimed the queries de-dupe based on email address.


    That has not been our experience, but other services like Constant Contact etc. de-dupe.



    It seems that if enough Blackbaud users complain about this flaw, we could get better programming from Net Community. It is very frustrating.
  • Judy Shafer
    Judy Shafer ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply
    Judy Shafer:
    The last Class I took (for $250) on creating and sending emails, the Net Community teacher claimed the queries de-dupe based on email address.


    That has not been our experience, but other services like Constant Contact etc. de-dupe.



    It seems that if enough Blackbaud users complain about this flaw, we could get better programming from Net Community. It is very frustrating.
    My work-around has been to export the query list and de-dupe in excel. But that takes the dynamic aspect away.
  • Rick Geyer
    Rick Geyer ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    I understand if merge fields are being used to customize the email, that multiple emails may be sent to the same address. However most of the emails we send out to the entire school do not use customizations of any kind. It should be a user option when sending the email if they want to de-dupe or not. It could be a check box in the message settings. De-duping in excel and uploading a static list may work, but that forces you to have to do this every week (in our case) since we send out weekly email to keep parents informed.
  • Baisa tmp
    Baisa tmp ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply
    Yes, it would be nice if NC can remove duplicate emails before sending out emails.


    Some our constituents (husbands and wifes) share the same email address and it is frustrating to see that they get 2 emails from us. I don't want to remove an address from wife's record in RE, because they share it. So, it would be great if NC can de-dup based on email addresses!
  • Justin Morrow
    Justin Morrow ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 3 Photogenic
    This idea is currently being planned for our Q1 2014 6.58 release! This will work for all RE query based email lists and will exist as an option so you can determine what is the best fit for your organization.
  • Rick Geyer
    Rick Geyer ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    RE only? Is there any plan to roll this same feature over to EE?
  • David Hughes 2
    David Hughes 2 ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply
    Most of our parents use separate email addresses. However we regularly use the No Source template and mail to RE and EE queries at the same time. This duplicate issue also happens when sending an email like like we do because BBNC will remove duplicates from the RE and EE lists separately but then it will not check the two queries against each other since, technically, the records are two different records that are coming from different databases.



    Saying all that, the ability to remove dupes based upon email address will be WONDERFUL!! Please hurry and roll it out. :-)
  • Scott Palmer
    Scott Palmer ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply
    I saw that this was added as a feature for constituents from RE in the last version, but it really needs to work for EE records as well to be helpful for schools.
  • Jesse Hall
    Jesse Hall ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
    Karen Badham:
    Hey Kathleen and Katie,



    The long term fix is to clean up The Education Edge records. The short term fix is to use an imported list. Imported lists deduplicate based on email address. Here's the steps on those lists. http://www.blackbaud.com/kb/index?pag...



    If you'd like to see this functionality changed, please create an idea to say how you'd like this to work differently.



    Thanks!


    Karen
    I wish we had control over this imported list de-duping that we are not warned out! There are times where we have large lists with lots of information and have to send out a few emails to the same person using one list because they have, for example, more than one scholarship and scholarship contact. We can't put it all on one column or our spreadsheet would be unmanageable and merge fields do not collapse. I have made a post, hopefully it will catch some attention.

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