With thousands of contacts in your donor database, it's very likely there will be duplicates every now and then. This article explains how to use Kindful's Contact Duplicates tool to sort out and merge duplicate contacts.
Overview
The Contact Duplicates tool will search for fields within contacts that are similar, isolating those as potential duplicates. Contact Duplicates can filter matches by contacts with the same name, same address, same email, same last name and zip, same phone number, or same organization name. You can also see all match types at once.
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Choosing a Match Type
When you open Contact Duplicates, the page defaults to filtering by All Match Types. This means if any part of a contact (name, phone number, etc.) matches the same part of another contact, both will show up as a potential match.
By clicking the Filter by dropdown you can choose to filter through potential duplicates by other fields, such as name or phone number.
Merging a Duplicate
When you've chosen a filter for a specific type of match, any potential duplicate pairs should be showing. You'll see the Primary Record on the left, and the Potential Duplicate on the right.
Outlined below are the base guidelines for how merges work.
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Empty fields | If a field is empty on the primary record, but filled on the potential duplicate, then the data from the potential duplicate will be merged into the primary record. The inverse is also true. |
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Conflicting fields | If the same field is filled on both the primary record and the potential duplicate, the primary will overwrite the potential duplicate, and the information in the potential duplicate's field will be lost. If you wish to retain the data from the duplicate, you will need to manually copy and move the conflicting data. Except for the oldest join date, which will always be retained. |
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Transaction data | All transaction data and activity from the potential duplicate will be merged into the primary record. This will update the contact's activities trail as well as year and lifetime totals. |
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If you'd like to see what the merge of two contacts will look like, you can use the Preview button to see what would be merged or overwritten. You can also switch positions of the primary record and the potential duplicate by selecting Switch. When you're ready to process the merge, you can select Merge on the right, or declare that pair Not Duplicates.
| Note: merging cannot be undone. Please carefully examine the information for both the primary record and potential duplicate, as you may be subject to losing information from the potential duplicate if the primary record has conflicting data. |
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Examples
Refer to the table below for examples of what empty or conflicting fields would look like when they're merged.
| Primary Record | Potential Duplicate | Resulting Merge |
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Example 1 | First name | First name | First name |
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Example 2 | First name | First name | First name |
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Example 3 | First name | First name | First name |
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Example 4 | Transaction | Transaction | Transactions |