Foreign accents in Lookups in BBCRM

David Webb
David Webb
Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud CRM™ General Discussions

Hello: how does Blackbaud handle international names and spelling when it comes to lookups.

E.g. if someone has an accent as the proper spelling of the name such as an “l'accent aigu (é)" or “accent grave (è)” or “Umlaut (ö)” ,etc. and you don't spell the name with the accented letter but the anglicized letter, BBCRM doesn't find it. Other applications can adapt and find the foreign spelled name whether you search with the foreign or anglicized spelling.

I know you can check the “Fuzzy search” Advanced Search Option, but that gives you a lot of results – any other methods for using BBCRM when you have international spellings?

Comments

  • Kelli Crispin
    Kelli Crispin
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @David Webb A possible workaround is to create an alias on the constituent that uses only anglicized letters and set your advanced search options to include aliases.

  • David Webb
    David Webb
    Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    Thanks @Kelli Crispin we'd considered that too but we have a LOT of international alumni and donors, plus international Organization Constituents that use these accidents so that would be too much of an undertaking we think.

  • Stacey Segal
    Stacey Segal
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    Hi David, using Kelli's suggestion, this could be accomplished without a ton of effort using the BVDL. You can create a query in CRM to find names that include special characters. Then, using the OData Link on that query in a BVDL process map the name field to the alias value. Then, using an Orchestration or Lua, remove the special characters, leaving you with just the anglicized letters. Then you could schedule this to run regularly to pick up any new names that are added, including those with special characters. Happy to have our support team help you with it if you think it's an option you'd like to look into.

  • Amanda Brown
    Amanda Brown
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @David Webb - We created a Global Change to add the alias with the anglicized letters to improve our ability to search for the names. What is nice about the Alias fields is that you can still split out First Name, Last/Key Name (for organizations), etc.

  • David Webb
    David Webb
    Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    thanks @Stacey Segal – that might be do-able.

    So I guess we'd have to run that Global change to identify names with accents and add the Search Name on a regular basis to catch new constituents added since the initial run: after our new grads are loaded after convocation, after new constituent are added for Events, new Constituent donors, etc. Maybe monthly or quarterly, or after we know a big batch of new Constituents have been created….?

  • Stacey Segal
    Stacey Segal
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @David Webb we could just add it to every process that brings data in so it happens in each upload. If you'd like we can set up a call. Email me stacey.segal@brightvinesoultions.com and we'll walk you through it.

    Stacey

  • David Webb
    David Webb
    Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    Thank you for the offer @Stacey Segal. I have submitted a request to our support team. Will see if we can afford the LOE on this and I'll add to the request you have offered support.

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