Duplicate Candidate Families

Jess Moxsky
Jess Moxsky
Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Enrollment Management System™

Hello!

Every admissions season we deal with duplicated candidate and family records. Often times this happens to families who forget that they had already started an application who then create an additional account, leaving two candidate records that cannot be merged because of the open applications. We also encounter families who had previously applied and been deactivated who create new accounts before we realize that they are already in the system.

When reviewing the duplicate records, one thing we always need to look at is the date and time of the last login. Typically, that is critical information that informs which record should be kept and which should be deleted, or tells us which account a parent is actually using currently.

I have submitted an idea here to add “last login” to the Potential Duplicate User fields to compare and would love some additional votes or insights :)

Comments

  • Lauren Marcus Eisenberg
    Lauren Marcus Eisenberg
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    @Chris Felinski Yes! This is an huge issue for us.

  • Bryan Lorenzo
    Bryan Lorenzo Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    The second thing that would be nice is when a parent goes to apply a second student, there is a prompt that says “Are you applying one of the following siblings” and it would show the list of sibling that haven't attended the school yet. The information would be pre-populated for everything that it could be. Right now our parent applies sibling #2, and then they enter siblings 3 and 4 in this application, and if we didn't catch them the first time around, now sibling #3 and 4 both have two records.

    @Chris Felinski - great idea!

  • Jess Moxsky
    Jess Moxsky
    Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant

    Chris Felinski:

    I agree 100%. One of the things that would help is if the sibling block was more tied into the record than it currently is and was more of an “alive” record. That is our #1 issue with duplicate records showing up. We have a family who applies their first child but then lists the 3 other younger siblings, and those younger siblings have relationships that are tied to applicant, but nothing else. When I have talked to Blackbaud in the past about this, the response I have been given is that there is too much variability on who lives with who. I think it would be great to have a simple checkbox that says “this sibling lives with the applicant” and we could handle the 10-15% that come from more complicated family situations instead of no one being linked - or us having to do it all manually.

    The second thing that would be nice is when a parent goes to apply a second student, there is a prompt that says “Are you applying one of the following siblings” and it would show the list of sibling that haven't attended the school yet. The information would be pre-populated for everything that it could be. Right now our parent applies sibling #2, and then they enter siblings 3 and 4 in this application, and if we didn't catch them the first time around, now sibling #3 and 4 both have two records.

    I know this isn't the same issue you are having - but it is tied into why we have so many duplicate records.

    This also heavily contributes to our duplicates issue I imagine.

Categories