Duplicate constituent records undermine your trust in your data. Also, duplicate constituent records undermine your trust in your data. Despite your best efforts to keep your donor database clean, duplicates can still be a problem. But why? Here are just a few of the many ways constituents can get added to — and duplicated in — your database: manually adding, importing, form submissions, form submissions, third party integrations, and importing.
Duplicate jokes aside, avoiding duplicate records is an important part of managing your database and trusting your data. And, let’s not forget that it’s difficult to focus on donor retention when a donor is split up across multiple records!
Bloomerang currently uses matching logic to manage duplicates when running imports and when online donation forms are submitted. But, the only thing worse than having duplicate records is merging records that aren’t really duplicates, which is why we only match constituents when we’re very confident they are the same. That’s why we also provide you with a way to merge duplicate constituents from a constituent’s profile.
We think we can do more to help though, and that’s why we’re excited to release real-time duplicate checking for all your constituent records!
Bloomerang will check all your records for a duplicate match whenever there’s a change to your constituent list. We’ll notify you when we find potential duplicates, and you’ll now have a single page to review, merge, and dismiss the records we find. Here’s an overview:
Admin accounts in Bloomerang will receive a notification when we identify possible duplicates. You can either click on the notification to get to the list or use the new link we added to the constituent slide-in.
We start by showing you simple, side-by-side views of the possible duplicates. We list the matching criteria and matching or primary contact info on the simple view. Click on a pair to see expanded details of the constituents and take actions. If a pair is not a match, clicking on “Not a Duplicate” will dismiss that pair and we will not show those two constituent accounts as possible duplicates again.
To merge a duplicate pair, select the record you want to keep by clicking the radio button below the constituent’s name and then clicking the “Merge” button when it activates. We want you to understand what will happen when you keep that constituent. We use red strikethrough text to show you information that will be lost, and green text in bold to show you information that will be added or combined.
Good data is essential for furthering your mission and retaining donors. Bloomerang’s real-time duplicate constituent checking allows you to spend more time focusing on your donors and less time on data management.
To see what else we’ve been doing, visit our product Changelog.
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