Hello! Our organization is looking into developing a stored procedure to match and merge some of our duplicates automatically. Have any of you ever done this before, or do you know anyone who has? I'd love to hear what worked and what didn't, and find an existing procedure to base ours off of.
Hello. We worked with Tessitura to build one for us. It was a long but fruitful process we completed a couple of years ago, shortly after we went live. We had brought in data from three different sources and had thousands of obvious duplicates. We required at least one member from each department to meet weekly with the Tessitura team. We created a hierarchy to determine the keep and delete record, like current membership or VIP constiturency. We also provided criteria where we would absolutely need to review manually and that's in a daily report. The basic duplicate criteria is name and address (after we did a NCOA update) and so far, we haven't had to "pull apart" an incorrect merge. (I'm not saying it's not happening, it's just that no one has squawked in the past two years.) This has helped us tremendously and was worth the effort and resources to make it happen. Hope that helps!