Enable automatic address and phone number deduplication
In this article:
Address Verification and Address Deduplication
If you have Address Verification turned on in your account, all addresses in your database are being automatically normalized on an ongoing basis.
However, this can sometimes lead to the problem of duplicate addresses being added to your account when, for example, an address is normalized and the same donor’s recurring gift data later comes in with the address in a slightly different format, causing there to be two of the same address for one constituent.
A great solution to this problem is to turn on Address Deduplication in combination with Address Verification.
This causes your addresses to not only be normalized but also to be automatically deduplicated in the following ways:
- Whenever street, city, state, and zip all match, those addresses will automatically be deduplicated
- Addresses including only city and state will be merged
The ideal scenario when you’re using Address Verification is to also turn on Address Deduplication. This allows all addresses within a given constituent record to be normalized so that they match exactly and are then deduped as well. When the feature is enabled, the process happens continually in the background.
Phone Number Deduplication
You can also set up a feature that deduplicates phone numbers ongoing in the background by selecting the Phone Number Deduplication and Cleanup box, also available from your Settings > Subscription settings > General page, as shown here:
The setting enables the following functions:
- The phone number data becomes a normalized representation of a phone number, boiled down to a 10-digit number
- The system looks for duplicate phone numbers within a constituent's data and reduces the total entries for that phone number to one