Hello Everyone,
At the start of the pandemic nearly all of our staff was laid off and as a result many non-critical tasks like reviewing new records and merging constituents fell by the way side. So... two years later we have around 60,000-120,000 new records and over 3,000 merges to complete. In the past we delegated data clean up and merging to the box office, but due to continuing staffing shortages we'll need to find another way.
Does anyone have experience using automated procedures to clean up data and schedule merges. Is this possible? We'd like to add CSIs to new records with invalid or missing addresses. I vaguely remember reading a forum post a while back about some tessitura organizations who outsourced data clean up and merges. I can't seem to find that post again. Has anybody tried this? Anyways, I'd love to hear what you all do and discuss the best ways to insure clean consistent data.
Thank you,
Joseph
I'm also curious how your organization uses the new record summary report. How often you run it? Do you use it to check all new accounts or only to verify that imports imported correctly? Can it be used for anything else?
I schedule the New Record Report to run every morning and send to a small group. Our on-site Membership Team (front-line rep/cashier position) goes through the records during the slower afternoon periods to do basic clean-up that is not "damaging", meaning they don't change info; simply clean-up. They clean-up caps/no caps. Bizarre garbage in name fields (addresses, email addresses, zips, etc. that often make their way into wrong fields). We also have the RA Button for address verification. They do that, too. It is generally easy to identify unverified addresses because the zip is missing the +4. RA adds that.
As far as Merges, I think most of us are in the same position that we don't 100% trust automation and it needs physical eyes to do best, but no one has time!