Weeding Out Duplicates in Little Green Light

Though Spring is the classic time to declutter your house, we think Summer is a great time to declutter your database, particularly by weeding out duplicate records.

Deduping your data is not only a healthy practice for your CRM—improving the accuracy of reporting and analysis and possibly even lowering your subscription level—it also gives you a great opportunity to know your supporters. 

To help speed up the process, LGL provides several different options for duplicate review (found under Constituents > Duplicates).  It works best to select one at a time to clear before moving onto another option.

<  Name Only option is great for small to medium constituent list and will catch the obvious duplicates.  (Be careful before you merge two people with the same name--look for clues like middle initials or different spouses.)  However, it won’t catch those with nicknames (e.g. William Smith vs Bill Smith).

<  Last Name Only will help you catch the William Smith vs Bill Smith scenario, but it will likely also catch genuinely different people with the same last name who may or may not be related to the same household.

<  Address & Last Name helps to identify potential spouses/partners, which you might want to combine into a single constituent record or make one Primary Contact Type and the other Spouse/Partner Contact Type (we’ll discuss how households and relationships are made in our fall newsletter).

<  Email/Address/Phone Only options may help too, depending on how many of your records have these data points.  But be aware that just because they are the same email/address/phone doesn’t mean they’re the same constituent—co-workers can share the same “info@” email and phone number. (It helps to add an extension to a work number, if possible.) People who live in the same apartment complex or facility can share the same street address. In these cases, try to add a room number or apartment number to make them unique and ensure that mail can get to them directly.

To help prevent the build-up of dupes in your nicely cleaned CRM, consider taking these additional steps:

<  Make sure to enable both automatic Address Verification and Address Deduplication (found under Settings > Subscription Settings).  This allows LGL to review your address data nightly, updating to postal standard and removing duplicate mailing addresses within a constituent record.

<  When integrating LGL Form, check a matching preference (on either name and/or email) and check “Require Review before saving.”  Both of these options will help stem the tide of duplicates and allow you a chance to match incoming data to existing constituent records before the data is saved from LGL Forms to LGL CRM.

<  Review constituent match settings when using the Flex Importer (check out this LGL Knowledge Base article for details: https://help.littlegreenlight.com/article/272-control-duplicates-on-import.

Hope all that helps keep your data tidy year-round and lets you get back to enjoying the summer!