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 have written and implemented automated duplicate detection and merge scheduling for several Tessitura organizations, both consortium and not. The duplicate detection is customized to the organization's needs and priorities. As part of the process, the void merge attribute is added to certain customer records automatically each night, again based on customized requirements. The merge scheduling looks at the potential duplicates and schedules the merge / which record is kept based on a variety of factors such as contributions, ticket history, constituencies, planned giving, etc. The process consists of a scheduled report that searches for the potential duplicates and schedules them based on the criteria. The report is set up to be reviewed weekly, generally by someone in Development due to concerns on donors. There is a delay set up between that and a separate scheduled report that actually performs the merges to enable the constituents to be taken off the merge schedule if desired.
Hi Carol,
Are any of these organisations on RAMP? Would you be able to migrate the set up to other orgs?
Thanks
Louise
Yes, the majority of them were on ramp. I would be able to implement it elsewhere. You can contact me directly at ckeeney@arkmfa.org if you'd like to discuss it further.