We are preparing to acquire a large number of alumni records from our college. This will be our first large-scale data import. I'm not worried about the "how to" import, so much as I'm concerned about the large number of potential duplicate records. We have been gathering alumni information painstakingly over the years from a variety of sources and have been provided with data "periodically" from our college. Our database currently has about 45,000 records.  How would you recommend we best prepare/proceed with the import?

Great questions and glad to also see that you are thinking ahead about not creating more errors or work via duplicates than is necessary. 45,000 is a lot of names and you will want to be careful not only of duplicates but also of keeping the appropriate addresses, etc.  If your organization is going to continue to collect this information and periodically import it, I would recommend looking at a solution we offer: Import-O-Matic that automates this process for you.  We are a Blackbaud Partner, and Import-O-Matic not only automates this import process,  but also performs all the appropriate duplicate record checks, addresses, name, email checks, updates, etc that are needed for imports.  We have clients using this tool for large and small imports.

 If you have any interest in discussing, feel free to give me a call: 843-564-5387

 Pam

PalmettoTech

 Rachael,

I have a plug-in that performs such a duplicate lookup. ID Lookup takes a list of people and attempts to look them up in Raiser's Edge. You can map various criteria sets for looking up. The plug-in will try to match against each criteria set until it finds either a unique match or the match with the fewest multiples. The criteria include title, gender, first name or initial (you can set up first name equivalents so that Bob, Rob, Bobby etc will all be found if Robert is given - this can be user defined), last/surname, organization name (it can check alias fields too for last/surname and organization name), first line of address (it recognizes address type equivalents e.g. road, rd or rd. which you can also define), zip/postal code, email address, birth date and spouse. It can also match against various number of characters or soundex! Just as with the RE import module you can map your file to the plug-in's standard naming convention and save this as a template for future use.

You can filter your results by an existing query, by constituent code or by attributes so that you do not look at your whole database just some of it.

It is extremely flexible and has a large user base all over the world.

Please feel free to ask any questions to me directly or go to my site and download a full working version tied to the sample database. You can also check out a screencast of IDLookup in action from this link.

Thanks

David