Heart and Stroke Foundation: Automated Duplicate Management
It All Began When...
The Heart and Stroke Foundation (HSF) began migrating its fundraising websites from Blackbaud's legacy Kintera CRM platform to its TeamRaiser (CMS) / Convio Luminate CRM platform through HJC, a development vendor.
The HSF Business Solutions Web team that I oversaw managed donor support for the first year, and managed the websites' content, functional updates and technical / donor support from the second year onwards.
Challenge
The Convio CRM platform has various email address configuration options, allowing constituents to have multiple user accounts with separate email addresses, or a single email address for multiple users.
By default, the platform automatically creates a constituent record as soon as someone enters their name and/or email address on any of an organization's web forms that led to several problems, including:
Someone donates to an event which creates a constituent account that they're unaware of. If they try to register for an HSF event using the same email, they're prompted to enter their user credentials which they haven't created.
The program teams had planned to upload event registrants from previous years to streamline registrations, which potentially could have created hundreds to thousands of duplicate records.
Solution
Researched the platform's email settings and duplicate management solutions, and found an application that automatically merged records based on Blackbaud's match criteria (algorithm), and also allowed administrators to manually unmerge and merge constituent records as needed.
Recommended and obtained buy-in from the Program teams to implement the solution, collaborated with the Blackbaud Product team to customize the algorithm, and created and tested use cases.
Updated all non-registration webforms to alert users they'd be creating a site user account, and created an automated email template that prompted them to login and create their user credentials.
Program Support
Created a specifications document for the Web Development / Tech Support teams detailing how the module functioned and merged records, and how to administer the module and troubleshoot issues.
Developed a User Guide for the Program teams to manually merge and unmerge records, and trained team members.
Created a custom merged records report that I reviewed to ensure that the support and program teams were administering the records, and to ensure all manual updates were completed within 3 business days.
Results
Merged approximately 7% (~6,300) of the constituent records at launch, then an average of 4% of new constituent records per week.
The Program teams were able to upload roughly 40% of event registrants from previous years without creating duplicate record problems, which greatly streamlined corporate teams' registrations by 80% (from 10 to 2 days).
Credited by Blackbaud's Product team as discovering a bug in their algorithm based on a use case that merged a user's platform admin and constituent accounts, which violated Blackbaud's security rules.