[Peter Gulka]

Recently my org purchased a subscription to an online services that provides profiling data for Canadian companies. We have been importing small chucnks of this data into our system as these are suspects/prospects for our capital campaign.

Do any of you have existing policies or procedures that you use for bringning in data from outside?

How do you dedupe pre and post-import? Do you de-dupe at all?

[DavidZ]

Many of the clients that I have worked for have de-duped their lists using a plugin that I developed. This looks up existing constituents based on dedupe fields (first and last name, address and postcode, etc). See this posting for more details. Duplicates! Oh, for the world.

Those clients who used this plugin insisted on checking to ensure that the people they were importing would not simply create duplicates as clearly once the duplicates are in place it is much harder to track them down and remove them.

David

[paulmorriss]

I dedupe using the first line of the address and also the postcode (postal/zip code). It's not very intelligent and won't pick up things which are effectively the same, but not exactly.

[SKD]

Regarding where to store the data, we bring lots of prospect info right into the prospect tab. You can list several different ratings (Blackbaud Analytics, Wealth Engine, etc.) in the 'ratings' section. If you don't have RE Prospect you can import to Attributes.
For de-duping, if you are familiar with Access, try creating a match code composed of the first few characters of several fields. Match your data in Access before importing.

[ida]

Hi

I match using Access where I have all our records in an excel file and import the ones I want to check. I can then check on First Name, Surname, Address Line 1, City, Postcode, etc. Then in Access, I update the file to be checked wtih the Const Id from the file of all our records. Once I export it, I can easily sort to find the dupes.

Does that make sense?

Ida