Rock U - People - Merging Duplicate Records

Transcribed Video Content

Unfortunately, duplicate records are basically inevitable and that's because there's so many different ways people can enter their information and things will slip through the cracks. Someone might fill out a form a second time, a volunteer may enter a person manually, but regardless of how these people are getting in the system, merging duplicate records is very important for data integrity. Now some things will be merged automatically in Rock when Rock can tell that one record looks a lot another record and we'll look into that in this video, but I'll also show you how easy it is to merge duplicate records when you looking at data integrity, looking at the different data in your database, notice that two people are very similar and likely the same person. Let's look at how to do this, how to set it up right now. Merging duplicates in Rock is really simple and there's two parts to it. First of all, you wanna find the duplicates, then you wanna merge them. So I'm gonna show you an easy way to find duplicates. We'll start by going to tools, then data integrity, and we're going to click on duplicate finder. Now when you're here, you'll see a report that's simply listing all the people that based on our algorithm are most likely they most likely have a duplicate profile. And this is a really easy place to take action from because you can see the confidence we have that this person's a duplicate, and you can also see who created their profile just to keep some accountability, the number of matches their profile has, and their account protection profile status and a lot more. And one thing to note real quick is on the block settings here, if you go to the block properties, you can pick the minimum and maximum that you wanna list here and for those confidence scores. So this will allow you to tailor what you see, but we're gonna click on one of these profiles. This one's more high confidence, and we can see immediately that this person has an email that matches another person's profile, same with an address and more. There's some different stuff, but you can take some quick actions such as viewing the person if you wanna see a lot of details on them, or you can mark them as not a duplicate or just ignore. So not a duplicate means we'll never really consider them a duplicate again, this profile we're treating as its own, or you can just ignore this person duplicate report for now. But we're going to select here and we're gonna come to the ellipsis up here and pick merge person records. Now this is when we move from knowing to action. So we know these people are duplicate and actually from this merge record screen, you can easily add more people if there's other people that you wanna merge this person with. And we can make it really simple. You can show matching data if you want, but usually you'll want that hidden because you only wanna see what's different because what we're doing here is picking which properties last. So we can pick which first name we prefer, nickname and connection status, a whole lot more, and it will often if there's no information for one person, it will favor the the profile that has information for a work number here, for example. And then you can very easily just click merge records and you'll see this is actually going to turn these two profiles into one. So it's really good for data continuity. We no longer have that other profile, and now we have one that has all the characteristics we picked from both profiles, and that is super helpful. So you'll wanna go to the data integrity report pretty often cause you wanna keep this list of person duplicates down. But heading back to data integrity, you can also see merge requests. So when someone that isn't in a data integrity role or doesn't have permission to merge people tries to merge someone, it will instead be sent as a merge request. And then you can if you are a data integrity worker, you can click on it and you can make the merge yourself. And this view is actually pointing out an interesting thing, which is you can see if there's the information present. You can see when a profile was last modified. This was the person we just merged. You can also see who did the modification and even for each individual record, you can see when it was last modified. So you have the full picture before you merge someone because that's something that can be dangerous and scary. This makes it a little bit simpler. I'm gonna show you another way you can do merges. So we're just going to do our person search here basically. We'll click enter and it will show us multiple people with the name that starts t and ends with Miller. And there are grids all over the place in Rock with people listed, and you can easily take action merging profiles that you notice are duplicates. So we didn't even go to any report. We just knew that these people were duplicates. We've selected them on the grid. Now we'll go to merge person records, and we can do the exact same thing. Now, one other thing that's different here is one of our profiles has elevated privileges. And this is an important alert because sometimes duplicate records, you're taking on the risk of merging people and say one person didn't have access to something, they have a lower lower security role, less privileges. We're merging them into a profile that has elevated privileges. So you just wanna keep in mind, be safe and take extra precaution when you're merging people with elevated privileges. Great. Not only is the duplicate record gone, you've also kept the history of someone's data intact, which is really important. So I hope you're excited that your data is more clean. Remember to regularly check for person duplicates and merge them and just build healthy habits with your data. Thanks for watching this video, and have a great day.