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Author: Joel Kristenson
Last Updated: 2016-07-15
Overview
This article will show you how to duplicate an individual contact record, which is a useful tool if you want to create a household record for a couple, without needing to go through the steps to manually ‘re-enter’ all the information (such as their address) but instead copy it form the source record.
Tip: We highly suggest that you track each individual of a household as their own separate record in the database, and then link them through a household relationship. This can be effective for many reasons such as one person being deceased, one person is the main donor, one or the other may have different attributes, or especially if one member has passed away and you want to hide them with a not attribute.
Steps
First you’ll need to look for either the individual contact record that you want to duplicate, or the single contact record that is being used to track a couple.
In my example I searched for all individuals in my database who had the ‘&’ symbol in their first name, which provided me with a single contact named “Denise & John” which I split into separate records later in this article.
Click the button at the very top of the contact record card to begin duplicating the source record as shown below.
Click [OK] to proceed.
Click [OK] again once the operation is complete.
Under the Open Window a new branch will appear for the new record that was created, and the new record will be the one that now displays on your screen. In my example it created a new contact named John Silvers.
Some of the information from the original record will by copied over such as:
- Physical Address(s)
- Phone Number(s)
- Attributes
Email does not get carried over.
*If you are splitting a couple, the system will automatically link them through a household relationship. In my example Denise was linked to John under the ‘Household’ tab.
You can now make whatever changes you need to both records, then save-and-close them both.
To verify everything worked you can run a search query by the address that the records share and you should find that there are two contact records (or more) at that address for the ones you created:
You can also verify the creation of a household record by navigating to the Households list and searching by the couples last name in the ‘Name’ field as shown below.
To learn more about relationships, de-duping, and householding your database take a look at the related resources below, and feel free to contact our live support team for assistance.
Related Resources
Article: Splitting Couples into Separate Records En Masse
Article: Managing Households – Creating, Deleting and Re-Creating
Article: Households – Creating, Deleting, Re-creating
Article: Household Automatic vs User Managed
Article: Household Record Count
Article: Household Records when Last Names are Different
Article: Household Export
Article: Find Possible Duplicates
Article: How to Find Duplicate Contact Records by Identical *Primary* Email Address, and Automatically Merge them Together
Video: Households – Delete and Recreate
Video: Households – Drag n Drop
Video: Households – What To Do B4 Householding!!
Video: How to Manage Duplicates
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