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
Some really interesting things here.
Auto Merging - Auto merging was set up at implementation well before I started here, by the Tessitura team. The prime consideration for this is the volume of data imports from venues and partner orgs. Some of the matching issues like how often are email addresses shared across accounts are also issues for email marketing and communication and need to be part of that strategy.
Cleaning of identifiers like constituents and attributes (and relationships) often need to be handled by stakeholders so a good data governance plan, regular schedule of cleaning and some resources to make that happen are important. I recently built a attribute/relationship report to assist us with working out who was in what category and what relationships do they have. Really handy (IMHO) for tidying venues (for touring), corporate contacts, schools, and government.
Cosmetic cleaning - things like phone formatting, Proper or Allcaps fields, incorrect emails - can be cleaned up in bulk (after a visual check) with some quick SQL. I know of some folks that do that as a automated nightly SSAgent job.
Love the new record report idea.