We’ve just launched a long awaited and much requested feature that will save huge amounts of time and tidy up your data... automated duplicate detection!
Duplicates slip in from all over. You might have a Tom Anderson in your database, but if he drops a check in the offering plate that says "Thomas Anderson" on it, there's a good chance you'll end up with two profiles for the same person. Similar situations can happen from online registrations, or old data that was imported from another ChMS.
How Does it Work?
The first thing you’ll see in the duplicate detector is a list of people who we think have duplicate profiles.
When you click on one of these profiles, we’ll show you some information to help you make your decision about whether or not those profiles are actually duplicates. If they are, you can merge them right there. But in the case that they aren’t you can choose to ignore them.
Here’s my favorite part: this tool will keep getting better over time. Every time two profiles are either merged or ignored, we are able to learn from that and improve the detector. By leveraging the large amount of data across all of our churches and using a technology called machine learning, our algorithms will get better and better over time so they’ll find more duplicates and generate less false positives.
Now you’ve got a brand new way to keep your database nice and tidy. If you have any questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!