How to prevent incorrect merges?

Alan French · July 11

Obviously the main answer is “training” but we've had a spate of non-duplicate records merged in error where the constituents are actually relatives or just have similar names, and I'm wondering if there's anything else we can do that would flag any inconsistencies to the person doing the merge so that it's more obvious they're actually 2 different people? Some of them have been merged from a batch and others have been done through the “merge two constituents” task.

Has anyone built anything to make it easier to compare the records prior to merging?

Personally I would prefer that we only allowed admin users to perform merges but unfortunately that's not my call. How heavily do your organisations restrict access to merging record?

Michael Flynt · July 12

@Alan French Zuri Group has a duplicate compare tool that will display configurable side-by-side comparisons of merge candidates that might be a good match for what you are seeking.

If you prefer to roll-your-own bad merge mitigation, you could construct a table to hold pairs of unmergable constituents that you could populate manually or by rules. If you add to that a merge task that throws exceptions if such an unmergable pair comes through and include that task in your merge configurations, you should be able to prevent the worst. You could also use the same unmergable pairs to remove OOB merge candidates from their backing table(s).

Alan French · July 14

@Michael Flynt thanks for the suggestions - I'm not sure that would help with this specific issue where staff are doing things like merging twins because they're coming up as high percentage matches despite having very different first names, but the unmergable list would definitely help in other cases such as where we have records that have been mistakenly merged in the past and want to prevent them from being merged again.

Tanya Crowe Boles · July 14

@Alan French In response to your question, “How heavily do your organisations restrict access to merging record?” We have a central 6-7 person “Records” unit that handles the merge requests, among many other constituent updates. General end users aren't trained how to do those. We do offer a small form where end users can request a constituent update directly from the constituent's record in CRM. It has options like, “Name Change”, “Marriage/Divorce” and “Possible Duplicate Constituent” and then there is a text box where you can add details about why you think a particular update needs to be done. Those then get presented (via a custom data list) to the Records unit to research and make the actual change in the system (or reject the request, if needed).

Kelli Crispin · July 15

@Alan French We built a custom space for merging. We used to have a number of dynamic data checks for finding dupe pairs, but they ran very slowly. We chose the most reliable of those checks and turned them into global changes that we run quarterly to populate a static duplicate table. The pairs are then surfaced on static listbuilders that have a view form that allows you to see the pair side by side.

The listbuilders have functionality to merge the records in either direction, but are sometimes prioritized if one is an alumnus and the other is not, for example. There are flags on the pairs to show if the DOB matches and also if the 2 records are related in the system. (We had some situations left over from conversion where related records were actually dupes.) There is also the ability to mark a pair as not being dupes, so they will not load into the dupe table again.

We expanded on this to feed dupe requests from users into a similar workspace for researching and merging. We have a grateful patient program housed with in the database, so we built a separate secure workspace for merges that involve sensitive records.

Alan French · July 15

@Kelli Crispin thanks for that, it sounds like it's along the lines of what I had in mind but even more detailed so it's good to know it's possible for us to build something like that. How much technical expertise would you say was required? We're relatively new to BBCRM and definitely don't use it to its full potential yet!

Nestor Pangan · July 15

@Alan FrenchThat's what we actually do. And it works perfectly. We the CRM Admins are the only one who can merge complicated duplicate records, especially if there are issues and they cannot merge it, or not sure how to merge. All of our users were given permissions to merge duplicates. They would need to submit a ticket for merging issues only.

Kelli Crispin · July 17

@Alan French Do you have developers using the SDK, and are they proficient in SQL? We can certainly share code, but you may need to modify it for your purposes. One of the more complex pieces is an action on the links on each of the 2 constituent IDs that opens the constituent page up in a new browser window, so you can view the entirety of the records on different screens, if the side-by-side view form is insufficient. However, the code is portable, so you wouldn't need to modify that bit.

Alan French · July 18

@Kelli Crispin we don't currently use the SDK though it's something we've got on our list to explore when we have the capacity. We have some SQL expertise in the team but not .NET

Thank you for the offer to share your code - I don't think we're at the point yet where we could use it but I'll make a note to come back to you in the future ?

Amanda Brown · July 21

@Kelli Crispin If there is a way to share this on an upcoming BB CRM User Group meeting where you wouldn't be sharing donor information, I would love to see it. I am very intrigued by your custom space for merges. ?

Kelli Crispin · July 21

@Amanda Brown I could possibly share redacted screenshots, but there is no practical way to show it in real time without showing donor data. I can't mock up enough test records in our lower environments for that.

Sara Barnaby · July 21

@Alan French, this feature is restricted within our organization. There are 3-4 people who can merge and they have admin rights. Even with that, there is additional cleaning of the db record (i.e. removing duplicate addresses and/or constituency codes) that is missed by the admins. I would suggest having one person who is detail oriented be responsible for merging records. Other things come into place such as Jr. and Sr., noticing our female constituents could be named after grand or great - grandmothers, DOB, gift information, etc.

Alan French · July 22

@Sara Barnaby thank you, yes this is exactly the sort of situation we're running into with family members who share similar names.

Does anyone have any tips on how to un-merge records that have been merged in error? We can add most of the info back onto a new record by hand but I'm thinking mostly of communications which are giving us a bit of trouble since they're linked to marketing efforts etc. ? BB support couldn't help but I know the community often have a few extra tricks up their sleeves!

Denise Clark · July 22

@Kelli Crispin I'm very interested in learning more about this, we need a better method to handle duplicates. I can use both SQL and SDK.

How to prevent incorrect merges?

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