Merging Duplicates

Hello and welcome to our pre recorded webinar on merging duplicates in DonorPerfect.
Hi. My name is Sean Potero. I’m a training specialist here at DonorPerfect, often working one on one with clients around the globe
to teach them how to best use their DonorPerfect database. Read More

Hello and welcome to our pre recorded webinar on merging duplicates in DonorPerfect.
Hi. My name is Sean Potero. I’m a training specialist here at DonorPerfect, often working one on one with clients around the globe
to teach them how to best use their DonorPerfect database. Today, I’m recording this fun, pre recorded webinar about a task that no matter what charity you’re working for, your database, likely could use a little attention to detail when it comes to merging duplicates without clean, accurate, complete data, all the whiz bang features in the world
that of your CRM integrations, your client relation management integration, such as those with DonorPerfect, your return on investment reports, your automated campaigns, etc, none of That’s any good if your data
is inaccurate or inconsistent, and nothing more inaccurate or inconsistent than duplicate profiles within your system,
many different ways that they could get In, and many different ways for us to handle them. Once we find them, there’s a report that we can run. Perhaps we find them naturally, maybe just looking people up using Quick Search, looking up information in a report. We might stumble across these. We might take note of those donor IDs and manually combine them. We might run a report to combine them as well. I do have a database that we’re going to go into here in a little bit with some examples of duplicate profiles, how we can find them and how we might merge them together. Before I do that, I am going to create a backup of the database, just in case I want to undo anything. This backup will allow me to undo any changes that I make.
From there, with that backup in place, I can proceed with merging of the records. Few different ways we could do this. We could do a simple combine, an advanced combine, or we could mark them as not duplicates. Perhaps it’s a father and son and they are legitimately not duplicate records.
Now, with this webinar
and all of our webinars, some of the features and fields seen in the database may be different than your own. Now the features are the same. Everybody has access to making backups and merging duplicate records, but the profiles themselves are all customizable, and the system that we look at today is probably just going to look a little bit different from what you’re
used to seeing. One of the biggest benefits of merging duplicates is accurate reporting and segmenting. It would be impossible to get an accurate count of say your lapsed donors when a single person’s gifts are spread across two or maybe even three or more different profiles.
This is also going to help with your communications with prospects and donors. DonorPerfect as a whole, works best when all of the goings on within the community are recorded in one place for each couple or each person or each business. This will also help give us overall Record Counts.
Now before we go through this process of merging duplicates, I am going to make a backup beforehand. This gives me a chance to undo anything, just in case
if I accidentally merge the wrong records. If I want to undo anything, this backup will allow me to do it kind of like saving a video game, messing up, and then reloading that save so we can try again.
A note, though, these these backups, are only good for a short amount of time. This backup that I’m about to make
is
only good for a short amount of time. I don’t want to restore this backup weeks from now,
although, do know that even without these backups, DonorPerfect is taking a backup of your database going back 30 days, if you ever find yourself needing
to
access the DonorPerfect backup because.
You do not have a user backup, a fee will be incurred.
So let’s dive on in here.
Everything we’re going to need is in the utilities drop down here in the white ribbon at the very top. We have merged duplicates near the bottom. But before we go there, we should stop at Backup and Restore.
We can see here that there’s three different backups. Two of them were December 16. The day of this recording is December 27 2024
and it looks like another user made one a little bit more recently on 1218, 2024
many different scenarios we want to create these backups, not just for merging duplicates other tools and the utilities drop down specifically importing
and global updates are both scenarios where you would also want to make a backup. Similarly, in the Settings dropdown, the screen designer tool used for customizing the constituent screens and the fields that you have available, that is another scenario where you might want to back up in case you want to undo all the changes that you’re about to make here, I want this safety net, just in case I accidentally merge the wrong records,
or say that two records are not duplicates, when in fact they are.
The very bottom we have our
asterisks. Are fine print. Automatic backups are retained for 30 days.
Additional fees may be
applicable to restore one of these automatic backups. Please contact support for more information. Now you don’t need the contact support for creating a new backup. I’m just going to click on create a new backup and say, okay,
backup complete as of 1227, at 320, Eastern Standard Time, there are 607 profiles in the database, and if I want to undo any of the actions I’m about to do, I can click on this Restore button to do it. No harm. No harm now, because it was only moments ago that I created it. If you ever do feel the need to restore a backup, please reach out to the Support Department. If you ever find the need or want assistance with this process, or any process, from the Help drop down menu, you can find chat support Monday through Friday.
I once had a client who was teaching themselves about DonorPerfect. All of their backups were from five years prior, and they clicked on the Restore button next to the oldest one, just to see what would happen. They they found out. They they took their database back in time five years, and they did not have a new backup
to restore it. With that person, ended up having to pay a fee to have their database restored. So just a word of caution here with this module,
need to be very intentional when we’re doing things in here. So
uh, with that in place, we’re now ready to merge
our duplicate records.
I do know that there are a couple things going on here that it doesn’t tell us about directly, but there are some safety nets here.
The first primary safety net is that main entry screen, address information, phone numbers, emails, physical addresses, they are going to be saved as alternate addresses.
So it’s it’s not possible for you to lose any address information, because no matter what, whatever address that you are
not selecting to be the primary, when we go through this process, it is going to be saved
something else that’s going to be happening here are merging of all transactional records. A profile for one of your constituents is not just a name and an address, but it is also a list of all of their gifts. Gifts, what we might call a transaction.
Table, transactions of gifts, transactions of pledges, those commitments, transactions of contacts, those touch points, transactions of alternate addresses, summer homes, work addresses, alternate ways to get in touch with folks. All of this is going to merge together into one we don’t need, we don’t need to tell the merge duplicates feature to merge all of the gifs when we merge the names and addresses as well, it’s just going to be doing all of that
flags. Flags are also going to be combined together any multi select fields of which flags is the most common is just on its own, going to get merged together.
Here’s a little preview of what we’re going to be seeing. This is our advanced combine option.
There is a simpler version, which I would
point you away from,
this advanced option that we’re seeing here really is the best way to go.
And what we’re seeing are three different columns
we have. Let’s see here we have John Snow in one profile by himself, but then we have a
more recent profile that has John and spouse egret,
not always, but most of the time. You if you see a bigger donor ID that is going to be the newer one. We can usually often assume that that information is going to be
more recent, more up to date.
In this case,
it’s going to be a combination of both profiles that we would want in the results, so we have the older profile into the result here, but we can kind of pick and choose by clicking on these little dots next to the fields what we want the output to be. For our spouses, if they have the same
if they had the same last name, they would share first name. But this case, John Snow, that’s his first name and last name, Egret. Egret wanderer, that’s her full name. We put our spouse with a different last name into optional line.
So really I mean this, this newer profiles, a little bit closer to what the DonorPerfect best practices are really a combination of both. We have salutation here, John and Egret. If Egret had John’s last name, it would simply be John and Egret last name snow.
She has her earning, so just a little different. Therefore, the
data entry,
ultimately, it’ll be a combination of both. If we happen to be missing any information here, we could always just type it in to results, if we had to
where the result is the end profile that we’re creating. These first two columns are two duplicate records.
One has donor ID, 1012, the other 1101327,
by the time this is all over, and we click on the combined button John and Egret and all of their donations, all their touch points, all of their alternate contact information is going to be on 1012,
that one profile you
so let’s hop into
our database here. Let’s go back. We have our safety net,
just in case.
From here, we can go to utilities and we can go to merge duplicates.
Immediately we’re presented with options to run a report. What our comparison operators are?
We are going to run a report here first to look for potential duplicates, and the way we’re going to do that is we’re going to look for a combination of last name, first name, address and ZIP code. If any two or more profiles match on those criteria,
we’ll see them in the results.
Now ideally, you’ll.
Play around with these criteria, try some different combinations, see how many duplicates you can find.
But here I have a duplicate prepared for myself. When I go down to the bottom and we click on Show Report in my database, I only have one duplicate, and it is for myself, one Mr. Sean patero,
total number of possible duplicates. One, me and
my colleagues, we stay on top of our duplicates. Even us. We create duplicates by accident. Every now and then it happens. We’re all we’re all human. But
I put this one in earlier today and a couple others so we would have some of the merge. And it’s giving us a few different options here, simple or advanced,
or not duplicates. If this was maybe a father and son, we might say not duplicates. And then these two profiles would never get pulled in
to the merge duplicates report,
but these are definitely duplicates. That being the case, we have two different options. The first
is a simple combine.
Don’t use this one. This one, I doesn’t give us
nearly enough information.
We have two different arrows. We have a right facing arrow pointing out at one duplicate and then a left facing arrow pointing at the other it shows us the address and it shows us the number of gifts for both no matter what the gifts are going to get combined. These are duplicate addresses that we’re seeing here. It would save the other address no matter what, whether, regardless if it’s different or not, it’s always going to save that information. But this, in my opinion, is woefully inadequate. These two profiles are made up of dozens of fields, and here it’s only showing us a small assortment of them.
At the top left, I can click on Back to the
results of the merge duplicate report, and instead, I’m going to go with an advanced combine. This is what we were seeing in the screenshot from earlier,
where we have three different columns.
First two columns are from my two diff different duplicates, and the third column is the result column.
Now, like I said, the the smaller donor ID is usually going to be your original one, and just because it’s the original one doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be the result column, but but in my case, I know that’s the more complete profile that I have. I’m going to stick with that one. If I wanted to go with the other one at the very top, I could toggle
between source and destination record, and now my result column is using the other profile, 1736,
but let me swap it back.
This one is a little bit more complete.
I am unmarried, but if we did have a spouse on either one of these, we would be seeing them, and we would get the opportunity to merge them together.
We could always manually do that here as well. We could just type into the results column, hey, even if we knew my middle name. Or if there was any other information that was missing or omitted from the result column, we could type that in here and fill in that missing information.
Both of the addresses are the same.
Uh, if one of them was different, we could always select the dots next to the other one, but here it doesn’t make any difference. And like I said, it’s still going to
take note of what the main address was on the old profile.
By the time I’m done, 1244 will be the only record for me left. 1736 will be gone. But I’m going to go through here, and I’m going to go one field at a time. This first section, it has the safety net. It’s going to remember
that alternate contact. And for me.
Information. Let’s get our emails. Let’s get our addresses. Anytime you have a checkbox like the do not send mail checkbox, it is going to be seen as either a y or an n. Y for yes indicates that that box is checked off or N for no indicates that that check box is blank or not checked. And here on my one profile, as we would for a staff member, we have me marked as do not send mail, so I’m not showing up in solicitations. I have a no mail reason that says as much no mail requested.
The narrative fields, there’s a very popular field for notes. Neither of my duplicate profiles have any miscellaneous notes. If you had notes in both of these,
you might want to copy and paste them in here, not everybody uses narrative, but if you do have notes in these, you’d have to manually copy and can paste, copy and paste in the results to combine.
We have our created dates. We can see this was originally created by a user last year in 2023
and then just today, I created my duplicate. So we’d have one to look at. The one I created today doesn’t have any gifts on it, and you’ll note that it’s not going to let me
pick
the gift value no matter what you know, even if I did have gifts on this duplicate profile, no matter what we want, that merging together into the end result,
and Gift Aid eligible, that is for our UK clients. And I could stop there, but I would encourage you to keep on going.
As I said, all these profiles are made up of dozens or really hundreds of fields, and if we keep scrolling down, we’ll see more of those fields.
Now, some of these fields
are calculated fields, something that says value calculated upon merge, anything that indicates a total, something to that effect we would call a calculated fields, and they show up here. Now, how much did they give to the annual appeal, let’s say, but this is going to recalculate itself, 2024, capital campaign total.
We can ignore some of these.
More. Yes, no. Fields. I
uh, membership information,
deceased information.
Uh, more membership fields, we can see that I’ve I have accurately selected the right profile. This one on the right really is the one that I want to stick with. This was the original one. This is more information. If you have purchased any well screenings over the years, that information is going to be seen down here. Here’s my membership information. I wouldn’t want to lose that. If you have any membership information going on,
let’s see what else what else
calculated fields? What was the last general ledger code I donated to clearly, the one profile has no donations, but no matter what, this would re tabulate itself once they’re merged together.
But there’s no safety net for any of this information that’s on the bottom. If there’s a data point that we might want to hold on to, we really should take a few moments and make sure that we’re holding on to it. And while this duplicate record that I made for myself, I didn’t have any gifts on it, I took a couple moments to put in some demographic information about Planned Giving, because I was working with a client once, and I was walking them through this whole process. And a lot of people’s instinct is they’ll stop after the addresses, which is, you know, it’s very important information.
How do we get in touch with them? How much did they give? And they’re about to click on combine. I’m like, Well, hold on a second. Now let’s, let’s just make sure. Let’s do our due diligence, and let’s scroll down here and make sure that our result column as all of the information that we want it to and for the most part right now, it does, but I can see here that there’s some planned giving information, which I put in. If I had skipped over this like my client almost did, that client almost lost out on
potentially 3% of that person’s estate and all of the notes in there about their attorney, who the executor is,
and all of that contact information that you would have for Planned Giving.
But oh, everything,
all of these fields represent the tapestry of information that makes up who that constituent is. You don’t want to lose out
on on any of it. I’m obviously, I’m biased. I’m biased, and I don’t want to lose any information ever. So yes, it might be a little tedious, but take a few moments,
consider your output.
Consider what the result is going to look like before settling and clicking on combine. So 1736,
that will be no more result. We have 1244,
we’ll have my profile looking like this,
and from here we can combine.
And from here, we could click here to go back to the previous list of duplicates, or we could click the first option here to go back to the first page. Where from there we would then want to play around with different criteria, see if we can then find somebody, maybe, based off of first name, last name and email, maybe, and then go down and show the report. And then here’s a couple others that we could consider merging together.
Rinse and repeat.
Let’s take a look at that profile that emerged, 1244,
as always, we can put that donor ID right into quick search at the top left, and it’ll take us right to the profile.
Here’s our main screen, all of my membership information. I made sure to hold on to a flags that always gets merged together, gifts, pledges, contacts, all that good stuff, but Oh, con accounts, my payment methods that that got merged as well. The big thing I wanted to point out is addresses is that it did remember
that other address that was in there. It’s saving it as an old address, a little redundant, but
hey, no matter what, just in case, it is gonna
save
address, city, state, zip, email, phone numbers as well. It’ll hold on to all that. And no matter what your communication method is, if it’s constant contact or if it’s physical mailing, there are options that will dedupe
any duplicates that are in there,
if you’re using the addresses screen for alternates.
So that’s that’s one way we can find and we can merge duplicates. We can run that report right from utilities. The other common way that duplicates are going to be discovered outside of the Report Center is going to be from a quick search, where we want to find a major donor, and we look them up, we want to find Pedro, and when we look up Pedro, we find that the duplicates that are
when this happens whether It’s from Quick Search or if it’s in the Report Center. I am literally holding in a pen in my hand right now, and I’m just writing, I’m writing the donor ID down. We have 1146
that’s going to be our original profile here for Pedro. And then we have 1737
somebody accidentally made a duplicate for Pedro. I wonder who it was. Uh, no matter. Doesn’t matter who did it, we can clean this up easily once I write down those donor IDs, which I already have done, I’m going to work off of the same backup
that I created a little while ago. And for.
Here I will go to utilities and merge duplicates. I’m going to ignore the first section here, where I have my report criteria, and I’m going to go down to settings for manual combine.
Now it has defaulted to simple combine
instead. Make sure you’re selecting Advanced combined. That’s always the way to go.
There’s an option here for auto de dupe. It is tempting this option to
automatically remove duplicates. Do not trust it. This is the only automation in DonorPerfect that you cannot trust. Not a fan of it. Not even going to go over it. This should be a manual process performed by a person.
And I found my duplicates. No report needed. I’m going to go with an advanced combine, and then at the very bottom, I will click on combine manually.
And now it almost looks looks a little familiar. I have two options here to look up names.
Let’s go with the first one,
and I could look up Pedro again to find those donor IDs and select it. But fortunately, I wrote them down.
1146,
we have that selected. And then let’s go with the other one. Look up name,
and it does remember that I looked up Pedro recently. Here he is down here, 1737,
because I opened up his profile. It remembers,
but I also wrote it down,
and now
very familiar View we just went through this process for myself, it looks like, though, the order of operations that I did it, it’s defaulting to the newer one that I created that doesn’t really have any type of information at all, so I’ll switch them around at the very top,
change the source and the destination record. Now my result column is 1146,
want to make sure that we have our addresses, we have our phone numbers, we have our emails, we have our narrative notes. He’s such a good actor. If there were other miscellaneous notes about Pedro and the other profile, again, we might want to copy that and paste that into our narrative field. It’s the one catch. Everything else combines, but something like narrative that field you’ll need to copy and paste.
And always interesting to see, you know, the original created date, the user ID that created it. Again, we can see, I made this duplicate just today,
and this time there was a donation on there. Very typical, very typical and very problematic if we’re looking for financial information or and if we’re looking for it to be reliable. If I was running a report to find my one time donors, Pedro, our very major donor, would come up in there. He’s donated now 88 times, but not going to show that accurately until we merge these.
And then I’ll just take a moment
also let me make sure we have our check boxes. Yep, he can be contacted. He is an individual, as a person, as a donor type.
Ignore our calculated fields. Those will recalculate
that membership information
we have not wealth screened our our database of celebrities and cartoon characters. But had we down at the bottom, we would have all that wealth screening information, market value, real estate holdings. Uh, does this person have a boat registered with the Coast Guard?
Uh, all that very interesting niche information you can get from either donor search or true givers would would all be down here,
specifically on the bio screen, is where most of that wealth info lands. True givers would be on the main screen.
And I know I haven’t, uh, well screened Pedro Pascal. We don’t have his address for a well screening, but
still, always a good habit. Take a few moments scroll through, make sure you’re getting that planned, giving information or or anything. You never know when a piece of an.
Information might be useful in the future.
With that said, let’s combine and we have one less duplicate.
Try that. One more time.
Up. Looks like we’re good.
Uh, every now and then you will get an error message. Oftentimes it’s uh inaccurate.
1737, is no longer a profile. Let’s look up 1146,
there we go. Just one profile for Pedro.
So to recap, always create a backup before cleaning up duplicates. Just in case you select the wrong option, it will allow you to undo it. If you are sharing this database with other people, I would let everybody on your team know, hey, I’m making a backup. I’m going to be going through this process. Give me some time, just in case we have to restore that backup. Nobody else’s work is going to be undone and periodically check for these duplicates once a year. You don’t need to be doing it every single week, but the very least, I would do it once a year, before your end of year tax letters, or maybe before a big mailing.
After imports as well, if you are importing constituents from a third party, that is a opportunity for duplicates to create it, as well as transactions coming in from online forms, specifically online forms classic as a little bit of a potential there for duplicate creation. So
uh, play around with the different merge options. Again, I would avoid simple combine. I would also avoid the auto de dupe and go with that advanced combine. Take your time going through it, making sure that the result column and the result profile is what you want.
Thank you so much for watching. This has been merging duplicates in DonorPerfect. I have been Sean Potero and you have been a great audience. Thanks for watching, and keep up the good work.