So we are finally ready to start tackling merging duplicate records! Sadly we have quite a large amount to tackle first. About 12,000. Gulp. What I'm thinking of doing is running the identify dupes procedure once and then scheduling the merge procedure to run nightly so that any dupes that were scheduled that day get merged and off the list.
After we tackle those then we had decided to schedule the procedures to run weekly, but I'm interested to hear how often other organizations schedule these procedures to run. Do you find it's better to do it daily or weekly?
Any advice on how to get our massive amount of duplicates down quickly? I think we're going to divide the alphabet up so we can have several people working on scheduling them at once.
Thanks!
I identify duplicates at least once daily and merge at least once daily. Many duplicate accounts are built on the web; I want tickets to print with the correct patron number and contributions to go to the correct membership. During a period of heavy web activity, I can spend an hour or two on merging accounts; if I did it once a week, I think I’d lose a full day. However, I’m pretty compulsive about post-merge cleanup—deleting duplicate addresses, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers; making sure that web orders keep the correct address/eaddress references; checking all salutations; and other stuff like that.
I don’t worry (too much) about duplicates that aren’t in actively used accounts. As people find them, we clean them up. We also ask our mail house to check for and suppress duplicate addresses when we are doing bulk mailings where the list pull criteria are very broad.
Perhaps a way to handle the backlog is to set the Identify Duplicates procedure to look for accounts touched in the last day or week (since your last run), and clean up those—and not worry about the many accounts that are sitting there untouched. You could then attack the backlog slowly, at your leisure, as you have time.
Lucie
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Lucie Spieler
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I can see the benefits in scheduling both procedures to run daily. And some weeks we have very heavy web traffic, which is where the majority of our duplicates come from so it would be easier to keep on top of. I like the idea of just focusing on merging the active accounts. That makes the task seem a little less daunting.