Hi, new to Tessitura as of December last year, though not new to databases.
We have a huge amount of duplicates, which seem to mostly be the result of donors logging in to buy tickets and setting up new records for themselves. Today I came across a record of a man who apparently has four daughters named Ruby! Each time new tickets (for classes in this case) have been booked, a new record is set up.
I know how to merge duplicates. My question is more around best practice in catching these and fixing as they come up, and also if anyone can shed any light as to why this happens and if we can do anything from the ticketing side to prevent it??
Any thoughts gratefully received.
Good morning Stephanie,
Welcome (somewhat belatedly) to the Tessitura Network!
I don't know that I necessarily have any magic bullet solution to assist with regard to avoiding duplicates, though I can speak to how we manage them in our specific consortium environment.
We use Freshdesk for our support ticket/help desk solution and have specific forms set up so that when our users find duplicate accounts, they can report them to us and let us know which account needs to remain and which needs to merge into that one (plus space for any specific directions). Our consortium staff (which is small-yet-mighty and numbers 3 employees including me) then acts on these merge requests from our 90+ users at 7 organizations.
Do you all use TNEW for online purchasing? If so, having logins assigned to your users should help to avoid the issue you have with people creating duplicates with every new online transaction, so long as people are using the same email address to login each time.
Thank you,
Brian
Thanks Brian, appreciate your thoughts on this! Definitely think it's worth us setting up a system re merging so that we don't have too many hands in it and have a clear structure. We do use TNew and assigned logins...and have some users using different email addresses, which gets a bit tricky :-)