Searching for duplicate members would be a huge help for our client who has over 5000 members and growing. Ideally catching and of matching first name, surname, phone, email address, location would improve record currency management no end. If a wild card search parameter could be configured, local to the customers data (ie registration number) that would also be a tremendous asset.

Even when people think they keep a single email address, like for work, their employer's IT systems may change or allow formats and forward both versions to their inbox. I just merged a member who had lifetime status under 'first.lastname' format but always considered their email 'first_lastname' format. WA didn't catch matching name, phone, address, and organization, just let them create a new account last year to register for an event (as a non-member).

Often a member will donate, or buy store merchandise, and enter an e-mail different than the one they are set up with as primary in Wild Apricot. This results in a duplicate contact that needs to be merged. WA needs to write some "fuzzy logic" code that will spot potential duplicates and send them to the attention of the admin, or write a tool we can use. Not an original idea as 60 others before me have pointed out.

Need a way to find duplicate members. These would be members who registered using two different email addresses and therefore look like two different people when they are not. Should be simple programming add to the search function.

is there still no progress here? I'm seeing requests dated back to 2015. Please tell me there is a solution at this point!

Yes, please. I just reviewed over 5,000 accounts and now have around 3,000. Please see what you can do to help.

Add the option for multiple email addresses so that we can merge duplicate accounts and keep the email addresses. This will help find alumni that try to sign up for multiple free trial accounts. Also please add a feature that checks if a user's account already exists based on pre-existing phone number, address, and credit card in the system

It would be very helpful to have WA key off more than just the email field for person. In today's world too many people have multiple email accounts. In addition to wasted admin time to export to excel, compare, then merge or update manually, the difficult here is the count of New records is inaccurate every single month. There needs to be a way for the software to take the burden off an admin for this data integrity effort.

Allow each contact to have multiple email addresses stored in their accounts. This will help spot people who try to sign up for a free trial with a different email address.

In real time would be good, but to keep it simple, just a utility that would provide a listing that shows suspected duplicates, and the admin could decide.

This is a basic support tool. I don't want this to come across the wrong way, but WA might not be highly motivated to assist users in reducing their number of contacts.

Better database tools to prevent and/or manage duplicate contacts.

Duplicate contact- same email

This would be so helpful. Especially since our members tend to move around to other agencies. Name recognition and/or email address should work fine for identifying them.

I have too many people making duplicate accounts. We need a feature that will prompt users that they may already have a membership or be in our database as a contact.

I have seen security systems which will prompt you to "fill in the blank" for emails. If the software was set-up to recognize potential duplicates, it could prompt users with an “is this you” message and a fill in the blank email: joh.....g....@..er.....com

If the user recognizes this as a previous email they might have used for our organization, then we be given instructions on how to proceed. If not, then they can go ahead and make a new account.

This is problem for our staff in keeping the database organized, and for our members, who get very frustrated when they think they paid their membership but don’t realize they have two accounts and get issued a renewal reminder from the second account.
Thanks!

Why not let the admin set fields for finding duplicates? (perhaps with suggestions)
Personally I've found mobile phone number to be nearly 100%.
First and last name are worth a look but not definitive.
There should be an ability for an admin to bring up suspected duplicates and compare and merge if necessary.

It would be trickier to spot duplicates 'in real time' when someone is registering for an event with a different email, because of the privacy concerns mentioned below. But at least give the admins the tools.

How would you define a duplicate contact? What are criteria to recognize duplicates?

MVMA is also interested in an automated search for duplicate records to help streamline our monthly database maintenance.

Please, please give us a way to find/merge/remove duplicates. At least on the admin side. Swansea and sysadmin seem to be on the right track.

At the moment I'm trying to do it with our 2500+ contacts by exporting to Excel and finding them there. Not happy...

As part of this feature, would like it to be possible to be able to import from excel, contacts that do not have email addresses but do not want to create a new record every
time we do an import.

This would be a great addition. Might it be possible to have a "duplication preventer" as part of the database? This would be automatic when someone attempts to join, the system would scan for that person using the Last Name, First Name and give the person a note that says someone with that Name has membership and tell them to contact the administrator guru for advise. I have a lot of members that have changed their email address and didn't/don't change their profile, which leads to re-joining and a duplicate membership.