Workflows - Validating Constituents (New Gift Welcome Workflow)

Chris Calby

Hi All,

I'm new to workflows so apologies if this has been asked anywhere else. I can't find in any existing KB or online forums.

I have a workflow triggered on constituent gives gift > new gift. i.e. I'm creating a "welcome to our family" type workflow.

How are those constituents validated if it's a new gift? i.e. if someone puts in a different name and same address or same name at a different address, how does RENXT know to de-dupe and then send or not send the proper email? Do I have to go through data health and once I merge or mark records as separate, RENXT will then trigger the workflow?

What's the best way to deal with this if anyone has any tips?

Chris

Katie Beilfuss

We found that blackbaud does a pretty terrible job recognizing duplicate records when someone (who is already in our database) donates or registers for an event through a blackbaud form. We have queries set up to identify these new records so that we can clean these up at least weekly. We stopped doing our new member welcome email series as an automated workflow and instead schedule the new member welcome email series manually once a month after we've had a change to make sure all the dupes are gone. Nothing like sending a long-time donor an email that says, "welcome to the family, new person!" We've decided it's worth the extra human time to make sure these new member emails only go to people who are new and not to trust blackbaud to be able to recognize a dupe record.

Ryan Hyde

As Katie said, RE is bad at this. Workflows just run off of a constituent list, so whoever shows up on that list gets triggered in the workflow. There's no intelligence there, no comparisons, no last minute checks.

For this reason, I and many others have entirely abandoned workflows.

You could, however, try to be extremely careful. You could have one list that aggregates potential new donors. You'd have to go through them and dedupe them yourself, but this list would not be connected to a workflow, so you could take your time and figure out who's who. If you don't experience a ton of new donors, then this may be manageable.

Once you're done cleaning up this list, you could save the list and then add its contents to a different list that IS attached to a workflow. Once they get dumped into this secondary list, the workflow will trigger.

It's labor intensive, and maybe not the best solution, but it's at least possible. Given the limitations of lists, you may actually have to start with a query, dedupe everyone, save that as a static query, dump that into a new list, and dump that new list into your workflow list. Not ideal! But maybe doable if you're wedded to the workflow new donor welcome series idea.

Austen Brown

If you'd like to continue to use the workflow, I recommend putting in a couple day to week delay into the workflow. To ensure that you have time to complete your clean-up measures for preventing duplicates.

Aldera Chisholm

This doesn't solve the workflow problem, but I've seen a lot of comments about people having issues with dupes from forms. If that's the case, you may also want to change your Online Data Review settings to "Review and Match All…" Yes, it's a bit of a pain, but, if the quantity of gifts coming in is manageable for you, it might be worth it.