Contact Duplicates

Duplicate contacts create unnecessary problems like storage full, unexpected shutdown, etc. To manage such problems, the above article provides deep insight on how to merge duplicates contact in Outlook using manual and automated approach. Try both the methods and decide on the one you like better.
You can use the Link duplicate contacts tool to clean up your contacts. This tool identifies contacts that have multiple entries and gives you the option to link them so they appear as a single contact. You can unlink contacts later if you wish.
The contact record will still exist in the system, visible only to administrators, and flagged as 'Not a duplicate' for the base contact. The Potential Duplicates Page. The Potential Duplicates page on candidate and contact records consists of a grid that summarizes information about any potential duplicate contacts including the created date.
In that case, if you search for a specific potential duplicate contact by ID or full name, it will always be found. There are four columns in the Manage duplicates window: Contact 1 - The potential duplicate of Contact 2. Select the contacts name to view more profile information. Contact 2 - The potential duplicate of Contact 1.

Delete Contact Duplicates Icloud
Iphone Contact Duplicates
Ios Contact Duplicates
Contact Duplicates Android

Standard

Contact Merge - Standard allows users to merge contacts on a contact-by-contact basis from individual user profile pages. With Contact Merge - Standard, you must already know which contacts you want to merge together.

Plus

Contact Merge - Plus locates all potential duplicate records and organizes them into duplicate pairs. You can manage these pairs to determine which records to retain, which records to merge into the retained records, and which records to mark as Not Duplicates. See Managing multiple duplicates for more information about Contact Merge - Plus.

The following items are important to consider when working with the Contact Merge feature:

In the Other Memberships field, groups to which contacts belong are displayed. This includes Membership and Subscription groups as well as Chapters, Committees, Event registration rosters, and Relationships, and all event functions for which a contact is a member.
In order to properly merge contacts that each have user-defined table data created in iMIS Desktop, the Always Create option must be enabled. If Always Create is disabled, the contact's data will not be merged.
In the Custom Data field:
- For single instance data sources, you can expand and compare data line-by-line, and any missing data in the retained record is populated when the data exists for the duplicate record.
- For multi-instance sources, you only see the count of how many instances exist for each contact, and the entire record for each instance from the duplicate record is preserved in the retained record after the merge.
When merged, any permissions that were attached to the Username of the discarded contact are given to the retained contact. The Username of the discarded contact is deleted, and that login will no longer work. If the retained contact does not have a user account, but the discarded contact does have a user account, then the discarded contact's Username will become the retained contact's Username after a merge.

Note: Currently, organizations cannot be merged.

To make sure that important data is not overwritten or otherwise lost, there are also several areas where information might not be merged:

Events — If two people are registered for the same event, and neither person is cancelled, then their records will not be merged. Their records can be merged if one of the individuals cancels their registration.
Groups — If two contacts are active members in the same Membership or Subscription group, for example, Dues, Chapter, Section, or Subscription:
- If subscription records have overlapping dates, then:
  - If the subscription requires payment for membership, these contacts will not be merged.
  - If no payment is required for membership, then these contacts will be merged, and the membership is extended to the furthest date.
- If subscription records do not have overlapping dates, then these contacts will be merged and the membership is extended to the furthest date.
- If the number of subscription copies specified does not match, then these contacts are prevented from being merged.
Certification — If two contacts are enrolled in Certification programs, and both contacts are or have ever been enrolled in the same Certification program, then the contacts cannot be merged, regardless of status.

To merge contacts directly from a profile page, do the following:

From the Staff site, go to the account page of an individual contact.
Under the profile picture, click Resolve Duplicates.

The Resolve Duplicates window is displayed. The Master contact column displays pre-populated information for the contact.

Click Select a contact to merge to open a Merge contact window that allows you to select a record which you suspect may be a duplicate.

The queries you can access through this window are stored in the $/ContactManagement/DefaultSystem/Queries/Contacts folder. These queries can be modified by an Administrator if necessary. However, these queries are the same queries used by the On Behalf Of tool. Any modifications made to the queries for a merge will also be reflected in On Behalf Of.

(optional) If you are licensed for Contact Merge - Plus, select a contact from the Potential duplicates drop-down. The drop-down will not appear if you are not licensed, or if the Duplicate Search task did not find any potential duplicates:
- From the drop-down, you can select a new contact to load into the second column.
- The contacts in the drop-down will always be potential duplicates of the contact in the first column.
Search for someone with the same name. If there is a duplicate contact, select that contact. The column for the duplicate contact will be populated with the duplicate contact’s information.
Select the Keep this contact radio button for the contact you want to retain. The information from the contact you are not keeping will be merged. If there is an empty field in the kept record, information from the other contact is used to fill the field.

Note: After a contact’s record has been merged, a user might see errors when attempting to log in with the merged user credentials. This problem is due to temporary caching. These errors will pass after a short timeframe, typically between five and ten minutes.

After you have reviewed the contacts' detailed information, click Merge. The ID number of the contact that was deleted is recorded. The change log also records data changes for any field for which changes are normally tracked.
While reviewing the contact information, if you decide that the contacts should not be merged and are not duplicates of each other, click Not Duplicates.

Note: The following information is considered a PLUS feature and additional licensing is required. For more information, contact your AiSP or ASI Technical Support.

iMIS Contact Merge - Plus locates all potential duplicate records and organizes them into duplicate pairs. You can manage these pairs to determine which records to retain, which records to merge into the retained records, and which records to mark as Not Duplicates.

Once your organization is licensed for Contact Merge - Plus, System Administrators, and users with a Customers-security level of 8 will have the ability to manage all potential duplicates of a contact from a single interface. To learn more about assigning security levels to specific users, see Module authorization levels. System Administrators also have the ability to enable a task that will search the database for potential duplicates on a specific date and time.

All records identified as potential duplicates will be paired together, and displayed in the Manage Duplicates window. An alert will display on each contact profile page when potential duplicate contact records exist. Only staff users will be able to see this alert. To learn more about automated alerts, please see Displaying automated alerts.

From the Staff site, go to Community > Manage duplicates.
Click the Settings tab.
If you want to automatically search for potential duplicates at a later time, select Run task on a scheduled basis:
1. From the Frequency drop-down, select how often you want your database to be searched for potential duplicate contacts.
2. Click Save.
(optional) Click Find Duplicates Now if you would like your system to immediately search for potential duplicate contacts. Depending on how large your database is, this could take several minutes. You can navigate around your site while the task runs.
When the task has finished running, click the Manage duplicates tab.
You can search for a specific possible duplicate, or you can scroll through the list.

Note: To ensure a quicker response, when the results return more than 100 potential duplicate contacts, not all of the pairs will display. In that case, if you search for a specific potential duplicate contact by ID or full name, it will always be found.

There are four columns in the Manage duplicates window:
- Contact 1 - The potential duplicate of Contact 2. Select the contacts name to view more profile information.
- Contact 2 - The potential duplicate of Contact 1. Select the contacts name to view more profile information.
- Date Found - The date the potential duplicate was found.
- Formula - The name of the rule that found the contacts as potential duplicates. The default formula (ASI) identifies two contacts as potential duplicates if the following are true:
  - The first four characters of their last names are the same
  - The first character of their first names are the same
  - Their zip code in the primary address is the same
  Note: Currently, this formula cannot be modified.
Select the arrow to expand the potential duplicate pair.
Both potential duplicate contacts in the pair contain information specific to that account:
- Name
- Primary Email
- Primary Organization
- Status
- Date Created
- Last Updated
- Username

The contact information that appears is currently not customizable.

If the two contacts are determined not to be duplicates, select Not Duplicates. This will permanently mark them as not duplicates of each other.
Select Resolve to open the Merge Contacts window. From here you can view detailed information about the pair to help you determine if you should merge the contacts, or mark them as Not Duplicates.
After you review the detailed contact information, select a contact to keep, then click Merge.

Note: Once the contacts have been merged, they will no longer be shown in the table.

After reviewing the contacts' detailed information, if you decide the contacts should no longer be merged and are not duplicates of each other, click Not Duplicates.

If you would like to export the Manage duplicates table, select the desired export icon. Select Expand All to expand all of the nodes in each potential duplicate pair.

If you are experiencing a problem with existing members or users (who already have usernames or accounts) creating new accounts instead of signing in with their existing accounts, the following tips might help cut down on the number of duplicate accounts being created:

Consider adding user instructions on your Event Showcase regarding signing in versus creating a new account. Add a Content Html content item just above or just below the existing Contact Sign In content item. Emphasize that existing members should sign in with their account or use the Forgot my password or Forgot my username links, rather than creating a new account. You can even provide readily-accessible contact information or links so that users can receive assistance from staff if they are still having trouble signing in with their existing account.

Note: If you are using the default Event page, you will need to make a copy of it in order to add the Content Html content item, and then edit your EventDetail shortcut to point to your new copy of the page.

You could add notes inside your event description area. For example, add a note explaining that users must sign in first, and to use their existing account.
You could configure the existing Contact Sign In content item on that page, and change the text for the Create account link text, for example, you could enter Create a new account only if you do not have an existing account.

Note: If you are using the default Event page, you will need to make a copy of it in order to add the Content Html content item, and then edit your EventDetail shortcut to point to your new copy of the page.

You could add another warning or set of instructions at the top of the Create Account page with the Content Html content item. Emphasize that it is very important that users log in with their existing account, rather than creating a new account. Using the Content Html content item, you can put your note in bold, use a color, and so forth.

Adding one or more of these things to your site should help to mitigate the risk of duplicate account creation.

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Prevent the creation of duplicate data.
Merge contacts.
Merge accounts.

Prevent Duplicates in NPSP

Duplicate data results in unnecessary clutter, inaccurate reporting, and reduced efficiency. Imagine if you have two records for a major donor in your system and a staff person looks at one record that says that donor has never made a gift. The staff person then asks the donor to make their first contribution. While many donors might overlook the mistake, it will make some donors wonder if their donation is in good hands. The relationship with your donor suffers and that staff person will never trust your CRM system again.

Of course your best defense against duplicate contacts and accounts is not to create them in the first place. So, training for your end users is key! Be sure that all your training materials encourage users to search before entering new contacts and accounts. That being said, nobody is perfect. The good news is that Salesforce has a nifty tool that can help.

Salesforce duplicate management searches for duplicates upon create and edit and then alerts the user and/or adds the potential duplicates to a report. Duplicate management consists of:

Matching Rules - the criteria for finding duplicate records
Duplicate Rules - the action that is taken when a user starts to create a potential duplicate

Salesforce standard matching detects potential duplicate records based on exact matches, such as two contacts with the same name, Roberto Alvarez. But you can also set up a rule to identify fuzzy matching for first names. With fuzzy matching, Robert Alvarez and Roberto Alvarez would be identified as potential duplicate records.

NPSP actually comes pre configured with a matching and duplicate rule. You just need to review and activate them.

Activate NPSP Matching and Duplicate Rules

The NPSP matching rule matches on first name (fuzzy), last name (exact), and personal email (exact). Let's take a look at the matching rule and the duplicate rule and activate them both.

1. Click the gear icon ( ), then click Setup.

2. Enter “duplicate” in the setup search box.

3. Click on Matching Rules.

4. To review the matching criteria, click on the rule.

Here we can see that the NPSP rule matches on first name (fuzzy), last name (exact), and personal email (exact). The NPSP matching and duplicate rules have been carefully designed to return the best possible set of matching candidates. If it’s not exactly what you need, you can always clone the NPSP rules and customize then to meet your requirements.

5. If this meets your needs, then click Activate to activate this matching rule.

6. Now we need to activate the duplicate rule or what happens when a user starts creating a potential duplicate contact, account or custom record. Navigate back to the duplication management menu in Setup and click Duplicate Rules.

7. Then click NPSP Contact Personal Email Match.

(1) There are two actions you can choose when a user creates a contact that is identified as a potential duplicate. Allow them to create the contact with or without an alert or block them from creating the contact. In this case, NPSP allows your user to create the contact.

(2) There are two options for what can happen when Salesforce matches a duplicate using your matching rules. You can alert the user and/or send the contact to a special report. In this case, NPSP chooses to do both.

(3) Review the matching rules that you activated in a previous step.

8. Click Activate.

Bam! You’ve just put into place a critical piece of a larger data management puzzle. You are one step closer to keeping user confidence in your data high and driving deeper adoption.

How Duplicate Management Works

Let’s see duplication management in action as our NMH development associate Sofia creates a new contact in Salesforce. She is entering the list of donors from a small special event held by one of her board members. Because it's a new board member, Sofia assumes the list is all new donors and doesn’t search for the donor names before she creates the new contact. She creates a new contact, entering enters the contact name and email that was given to her.

Delete Contact Duplicates Icloud

Based on the criteria in the NPSP contact matching rule, Salesforce alerts Sofia that she may be creating a duplicate contact. As we mentioned, the NPSP duplicate rule determines Sofia’s options. Here she can click “View Duplicates” to choose to edit an existing contact OR she can continue to create this record and save it.

If Sofia continues to Save the potential duplicate, she will again see an alert about a potential duplicate on the new record. It will also show an alert in the potential duplicates component on the record detail page.

Iphone Contact Duplicates

Finally, if Sofia clicks View Duplicates, she'll be able to see the potential duplicate records, but she will not be able to merge them. Only an admin or another user who has been given the correct permissions can merge contacts.

Good thing the duplication rule also adds the potential duplicate to a report for her admin Gorav to see and clean up later if needed. Gorav created a custom report type that included accounts, contacts and duplicate record items in order to report on the duplicate items.

With duplicate management, we recommend that you start small by activating the NPSP rule and then add more if needed. Make sure your users know about the criteria for the matching rules and ask them for feedback so you can fine tune as you go along.

While it's easy to blame overworked colleagues for your duplicates, it’s possible that a third-party integration or a data import may have caused the issue as well. Despite our best efforts, sometimes duplicates happen. And when they do, there is a handy tool in NPSP that can help.

Merge Contacts in NPSP

NPSP includes a tool that you can use to easily merge duplicate contacts. With NPSP contact merge, you choose which contact to keep and what data to use from each duplicate contact. All related items, such as opportunities and payments, from each contact are moved to the newly-merged contact so that no data is lost.

Ios Contact Duplicates

Note that there is a generic Salesforce functionality that allows you to merge contacts, but this is not specific to NPSP. The generic Salesforce contact merge tool doesn't understand the distinction between a household and an organization account because household accounts only exist in NPSP. If you use this tool in NPSP, any merged contact will end up with an 'anonymous' household, so we recommend that you always use the NPSP contact merge when you need to.

Also note that to merge contacts, you must have the ability to delete contacts, access to every field on the contact record, AND access to both contacts through Salesforce security settings. All of this is required because merging contacts is destructive and it's easy to make mistakes. Once you merge and delete records, there is no way to get them back. For these reasons, we recommend that only admins merge contacts.

Note

The NPSP contact merge feature does not search for duplicates or merge in bulk. You must already know which contacts you need to merge and handle them individually.

Let's follow along as our NMH admin Gorav merges the contacts that he found in his duplicate contacts report:

1. Click the Contact Merge tab. If you don't see Contact Merge, click the app launcher in the upper left and then select Contact Merge from the list of All Items.

2. Enter the name of the duplicate contact in the search bar, then click Search. You can use * as a wildcard. For example, if one contact is Robert Alvarez and the other is Roberto Alvarez, enter Robert* Alvarez to find both contacts.

3. In the found contacts list, select the contacts to merge. You can select up to three contacts.

4. Click Next.

5. Pay careful attention when selecting the Master Record. This determines which account record the contact will be associated with after the merge. The contact(s) not selected as the Master Record will be deleted. Gorav examines the accounts associated with each of the contacts to merge and determines which should be the master account after the merge.

6. Choose fields from either record to include in the final merged record. Note that fields not chosen will be overwritten.

7. Click Merge, then click OK on the red, somewhat scary pop-up warning that merging is irreversible.

After merging, Gorav takes a look at Roberto’s record to ensure that everything was merged correctly and then reviews his report to ensure that he has taken care of all the duplicates. He has successfully flexed his admin muscle!