Webhooks for constituent merge

Chris Todhunter

We're building an application which creates a website account which syncs to an account in Blackbaud CRM. This often creates duplicate records in the CRM which are then merged, with the new record we created effectively being deleted. We're storing the GUID and lookup ID for each constituent which we need to update with the new values when they change. Is there an existing webhook function which will pass out this data to our application?


Thanks!

Ben Regier

There is no webhook for Constituent merge.  There is a webhook for constituent deletions that you probably already know about - that will return the system record id (or GUID) of the record that was deleted.  You could use that to search your application to see if it matches any of the GUIDs that you have stored there, but it obviously wouldn't be able to update it with the GUID of the merged record.


We have an application that creates constituent records, but we built a more complex process to avoid creating so many duplicates.  When the application needs to create a new record, it first searches RE to find likely matches.  If it finds any, it notifies an admin and presents them with all the options of possible matches.  They can select one of the existing records to update, or choose to create a new record.  This was more work to build, but it saves a lot of time in cleaning up duplicates.