Can anyone out there give me any advice regarding duplicates? Especially pertaining to spouses? There are so many issue regarding spelling error and wife purchasing ticket and bio 1name belonging to husband or partner.  Streets spelled a little differently etc....

Would stricter standards in the box office help. Seems like an impossibility to me getting them to standardize their work, but it would sure help the issue.

I’m going crazy right now with it.

Hi Lorraine,

A few suggestions that should help:

1. Training your users to search for records more effectively by using wildcards like * or ? and by using the checkboxes to check nickname, aliases and spouse information.

2. Break them of the habit of typing in the whole name when searching.

3. Have strict data entry standards (many clients have shared their own P&P guides and these can be accessed from the client documents tag in Popular tags.

4. Periodically running duplicate searches and after careful research merging records -- if you find many dupes are created because names are slightly different from expected, you may want to add aliases to the correct records to facilitate better searches.

I hope these suggestions are helpful for you,

Naomi

Naomi is right on.

We've also gotten a lot out of using Blackbaud's Address Accelerator. Our data entry folks know that they always need to hit F8 before saving a record which almost guarantees addresses will be consistent (and that the address exists) which improves the chances of finding a dupe.

Mitch

Raisers Edge comes with a barcode feature, which allows you to barcode all of your direct mail appeals.  We strictly do this for all direct mail solicitations.  The constituent id is included in the barcode, that way the correct record is automaticlly pulled into batch and eliminates the need to search for records.

 The scanners cost about $150-$250 per scanner, but has been well worth it!

Lisa Scott 

 thank you all for your assistance. Great advice