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 curious as to how consortiums handle merging - I am always hesitant to merge accounts for our partner orgs, even if it is an obvious duplicate. We also check to see if the accounts we want to merge have contributions before we schedule anything, I wonder if anyone else does the same.
Our system won't allow us to delete an account if it has a donation on it. So, if we merge, we always have to keep the donor account. We get a warning that pops up as well. We merge subscriber and donor accounts, but keep the account with the subscription or the donation.
In our consortium here in Tulsa, nobody at our sublicense organizations is able to schedule merges due in part to this reason. Instead, we ask the staff at our member organizations to submit a help desk ticket to our consortium staff, and then we take on the research responsibility to evaluate the records and loop in staff from organizations affected by the request to assure that everything is correct before our team runs the merge.