Do you have questions about contact management?

Here are the topics we covered in the live Ask the Expert session: (Will post recording for review when it’s ready!) 

Lots of questions about cleaning up duplicates...

How to find duplicates? 
​@rachel moody demonstrated how to do this a few ways.

On the contact record: click the three dots on the contact card and click Merge, this next screen will take you to a search that shows you potential duplicates. 

Using quick lookup: choose search criteria that you want to use to surface duplicates. 

Using Create a List (CAL): this gives you a list of potential duplicates based on selected search criteria. 

Note: you can only compare two potential duplicates at a time. 

How to select what is the “winner” data that will transfer to the single merged record. 
Radio buttons allow you to choose what data you want to keep. Anything that doesn’t have a radio button will be saved on the winning record. 

Next we covered the types of fields on contact record based on user role and permissions. (like not showing donation history). 

The next question was the best ways ​to categorize contacts by major donors: You can use CAL and edit contribution details to search for donors who meet a certain giving amount range and time period to ID major donors that meet your organization’s major donor definition. You can save this search so the list is always updating and schedule it to run on a regular basis. You can also bulk apply a major donor activist code to the records that meet the criteria. Additionally, you can use a workflow to add a major donor activist code to the contact records who meet the CAL criteria. 

Then we discussed how to use bulk apply to add new field or update an activist code etc to a list of contacts that you defined using CAL. Note: not everything is editable using Bulk apply. Some bulk data work will need to be coordinated with our Data Services team. 

Bulk upload allows you to upload new records to the system. 

Next we talked about source codes and activist codes and when to use them. ​@Patricia Frontanes  best advice is to use source codes to record how a contact came into your system (attributing a fundraising or marketing effort to getting this contact to donate or sign up etc) and activist codes are ways to categorize your contacts. Source codes are connected to “interactions” where activist codes are associated with people. Additionally i​@Patricia Frontanes gave a quick demo of how to use Workflow Automations to automatically apply an activist code based on CAL criteria. 

Patricia tackled how to identify contact records with at least one relationship by going to CAL and then using the relationship section to define what types of relationships you want to search for. There was a follow up question about how to get donation totals for folks with relationships and Patricia suggested using financial households to better track donations coming from related individuals. 

Rachel showed us how to edit a record and reflect that a contact record is deceased and related suppressions once a contact is marked as deceased. 

The next question was about best practices for saved search and saved lists. 

Finally, households. It was a long demo from Patricia and I don’t know if my notes will do her justice so check out the recording and fast forward to the 45 minute mark :)