survivorship policy when merging records

Darren Rich

I was interested to learn what policy others use to designate the target vs. source record when merging duplicates. We have a lot of membership transactions, so currently we look to the active membership to determine the target. For example, if record A had 30 years' giving history and record B only just appeared when renewing the membership this year, we would merge A into B. How would others handle this?

Alan French

We don't really have a concrete policy but generally I'd merge into the older record so that the metadata correctly shows how long we've had a record for them on the system, however sometimes if one is less complete than the other (for example if the name on one record is "J. Smith" and on the other record it's "John Smith") then I'd merge into the more complete record so that the full name isn't overwritten with the initial. Though you could equally just update the name on the target record before doing the merge, if you always wanted to keep the older record.