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
Joseph,
Add me down as another person who would not trust an auto-merge; too dangerous. Admittedly, our database is one of the smaller ones, but these are our processes.
The Box Office runs the "New Account Summary" report every day; wide open to get all new accounts created since it was last run (the previous day or over the weekend). They then go through and do a thorough clean-up of those accounts, prepping for merge any accounts they find with duplicates; those get sent over to the Patron Services Manager. She then verifies that it is good and schedules the merge; she is also in charge of scheduling from the potential duplicated list. We have one staff member from Development who is in charge of merging donor accounts. Lastly, I will sometimes step in for merges when there are questions as to our sub-licensees with donors and ticket purchases (we are in a consortium environment).
We also then have a set of list manager lists, each owned by one of the part time staff. Like looking for the word "street" fully spelled out to catch and correct those issues. They will maintain their lists to keep them to zero (with another list used as an exception list for those oddly named addresses like "124 Streeter Blvd", as that would clog up the results). Then, once a month, I run an account audit, where I look at all new accounts created that month to find any that got missed in terms of standard clean-up as well as any other oddities I can find through a database search, and send them back to the Box Office for correction.
As long as we do not get too far behind (we did get so during Covid, but we are pretty nearly caught back up now), it is a really manageable process. I only have to do a big dump once a month, and it is a pretty quick one. The Box Office stays on top of the daily stuff during down time, and the List Manager elements help to catch issues that arise due to patrons changing/updating things online.
Best of luck!
John A. Moskal II
I love the idea of creating a list manager list to find common errors in records. Thank you!
You are welcome! But to give credit where credit is due, I stole that idea from Beth Hawryluk. So thanks, Beth!