Although DonorQuest is designed to prevent duplicate donor entries from happening during data entry, it is still possible that there may be duplicate records within the database. This is especially true if you have imported data from another database. A duplicate record check facility is an essential feature of fundraising software, since sending multiple copies of a mailing to the same individual wastes your money, and can lower the confidence a donor has in your organization's ability to spend money wisely.
The duplicate record selection provides a very flexible way of checking for duplicate donors. The check for duplicate donor records basically consists of comparing donor records by specific fields. These fields are chosen by you. You may use any combination of fields, both pre-defined and user-defined. In addition, you can specify the number of characters from left-to-right to consider for each field you are including in the comparison.
Here is an example of a typical duplicate record check based on the Last Name, Address, and City fields:
Notice that we only consider the first ten characters of the Last Name. This reduces the chance that a misspelled Last Name will cause a duplicate record to be missed. Also, looking at only the first four characters of the Address concentrates on the number part of the address which generally comes first. This avoids having to worry about all the variations in street abbreviations and spelling errors (though it should be noted that DonorQuest has gotten very good at standardizing addresses internally during the check, expanding abbreviations to full spellings for comparisons, so the problem has certainly been minimized). Lastly we look at the first ten characters of the City. Any one of these considerations by themselves would give a lot of false duplicate detections -- the addresses for a lot of different donors would likely start with the same first four numbers for example. But taken together, these three considerations are unlikely to all be true for different donors.
Adding fields to the comparison or increasing the number of characters per field which are compared will make it less likely that you will get false duplicates in the selection result, but you may also fail to catch some of the real duplicates. In general, the default values work quite well (which you can apply by clicking the Use Defaults button), but you are free to adjust them to best suit your donor data. For example, if you tend to have a lot of post office box addresses in your database, then you may wish to increase the number of address characters to ten or more, since all the addresses starting with "POB" would always match if only the first four characters were considered for each address, and the last name happened to be blank.
You can also take an entirely different approach if you like -- checking all digits of the main telephone number or all characters of the primary email address for example. This is where you have to take into consideration what information you are typically able to capture for your donors. For example, if you have the main phone number for almost all of your donors, but not the email address, then using the phone number is a better way to go. Feel free to experiment here to see what works best with your data.
Once you get a duplicate record check selection result, you will typically do two things. First you may choose to simply view the result, ordering it by various fields such as Last Name or Address to see how well your particular mix of fields and character widths worked. If it looks like you got a pretty accurate result with mostly true duplicates, then you might print the selection using the, "Header - Donor Name And Street Address For Duplicate Record Check" report layout which is specifically designed to show duplicate records together by address. You could then review the report with other people in your organization to make a decision about clean-up, possible highlighting the names which you all agree are true duplicates. Finally, you can return to viewing the selection in DonorQuest, and physically consolidate the true duplicates using the DonorQuest Consolidation feature.
Duplicate Record Consolidation
In addition to finding and reporting suspected duplicate donor accounts, DonorQuest allows you to consolidate the histories of duplicate donors. While viewing a selection of suspected duplicate records, you can use the Mark button to mark actual duplicates, then click the Consolidate button. Be sure and mark only the records which apply to a single duplicate donor. For example, if there are three duplicate records which all belong to donor Justin Hayward, you would mark all three, position the cursor on the one of the three that has the most correct information, then click consolidate. Note that all donations, pledges, etc. will all then be copied to the one surviving donor account, and the duplicate records will be deleted. While each donor may have multiple donations, pledges, etc., each donor only has one Header record storing the main biographical information for the donor. So if you find that one of the duplicate records has a piece of biographical information you need to keep -- such as a phone number or email address, you should copy and paste it into the one record that you plan to keep before clicking the Consolidate button. This can be done by moving back and forth between duplicate accounts with the Edit form open, copying and pasting Header field data with the mouse.
Checking For Duplicate Donations, Pledges, Contacts, Etc.
It is also possible to check for duplicate donations, pledges, contacts, etc. either across the entire database, or within donor accounts. As with the check for duplicate donors, you may choose the fields to use in the comparison between records, and how many characters of each field to use in the comparison. For example, you could check for duplicate donations using only the date and amount fields like this:
To search for duplicate donations which exist within donor accounts (which can be caused by importing the same list of donations twice), include the Donor ID number in the field to consider like this:
Note that for numeric fields, you should always specify the entire width of the field in the Characters column. This is because numbers are formatted as right-justified character values before they are compared, and you want to compare all digits of any two numeric values.
Also notice that we chose Donations for the Source Table when checking for duplicate donations. If we had left it set at the Header table, then only the most recent donation for each donor would have been considered.