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Author: Joel Kristenson
Last Updated: 2015-06-15
Overview
This article walks through the steps to find duplicate contact records in your database by Primary E-Mail Address - which is a new feature that was released in 2015. It also shows how to quickly merge those duplicates where First Name and Primary E-Mail Address are *Identical*.
Tip: If you’ve never cleaned up the duplicates in your database take a look at these few articles to keep your database as tidy as possible:
- (Video) Households – What To Do B4 Householding!!
- (Video) How to Manage Duplicates
- (Article) Address Management
- (Article) Automatically Conform Addresses
- (Article) Auto-Merging Duplicate Address Records
Steps
Navigate to your Contacts (Donors/Voters) list.
Navigate to the General > E-Mail tabs, plug-in the tab, uncheck the Alternate box, uncheck all of the email flag check boxes, and click [Search] > (Load All)
The image below shows my query which produced 5,851 contacts.
Select File > Utilities > Find Possible Duplicates
Check the box for Email ONLY, Primary Email only, and click [OK].
This will run the process on all contacts that are in the list and provide you with the final count. My example results are below where the system found 154.
Click [OK] to finish.
At this point you have a couple of options. You could set an attribute for everyone in the list labeling them as a possible duplicate to cleanup at a later time, or you could go through the automated merge process.
I opted to auto-merge any contact that had an identical First Name and Primary E-Mail address.
Follow File > Utilities > Merge.
Select Merge contacts where email address and name match, and click [OK].
This system will update you with the results once it’s complete. For any records that didn’t merge you’ll need to either fix their name/address data so that it’s exactly the same and run the process again, or drag-and-drop merge the duplicates.
Related Resources
Article: Manually Merging Contact Records
Article: Auto-Merge Duplicate Contact Records
Video: How to Manage Duplicates
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