Potential Duplicates From Online

Proactive deduplication is an automated service for Salsa CRM+Salsa Engage clients. The name of the service describes what Salsa CRM does with potential duplicate records synced from Salsa Engage. Salsa CRM reviews newly synced records for data that may indicate that a record already exists in Salsa CRM with the exact same information. Salsa CRM then produces a list of these potential duplicates that you can review and resolve. Salsa CRM then pushes deduplicated records back to Salsa Engage.

Salsa CRM performs proactive deduplication for only new records, created in Salsa Engage, that sync to Salsa CRM. You cannot manually run proactive deduplication. Existing CRM records are not scanned for duplicates. See Constituent Merge Utility for directions on how to find and process existing duplicates manually in Salsa CRM.

When Salsa CRM finds duplicates, a "potential duplicate warning" exclamation point ( ! ) will appear next to the Tools menu in the top Salsa CRM navigation.

Proactive Deduplication Rules

Proactive deduplication follows different rules depending on whether a supporter is added via an Activity (such as signing a sign-up form) or via import.

Rules When Supporters Are Created from Activities

• Submitted email address matches one record already in Salsa engage

  • New data from the update will be added to the record that is already in Salsa Engage (a duplicate record will not be created).

  • The updated record is pushed down to Salsa CRM.

• Submitted email address matches more than one record already in Salsa Engage

  • Salsa Engage looks at the incoming First and Last Name and compare it to the duplicates in Salsa Engage that have the same email address.

  • If Salsa Engage finds a match on First Name and Last Name...

    • New data from the update will be added to the record that is already in Salsa Engage (a duplicate record will not be created).

    • The updated record is pushed down to Salsa CRM.

  • If Salsa Engage does not find a match...

    • A new ("potential duplicate") record is created using the new First Name, Last Name, and email address.

    • This new record will then be pushed down to Salsa CRM. It will the be treated as a new record in Salsa CRM and run through the proactive deduplication algorithm.

Rules When Supporters Are Created from Import

• Imported email address matches one record already in Salsa engage—The record will be overwritten.

• Two records in Salsa Engage use the same email address—Import using email address will not be permitted. The import report will note that there are multiple records with the same email address. To resolve this issue, you must merge the records using the merge tools in Salsa CRM before they are imported into Salsa Engage. Alternately, you can import into Salsa CRM and use the Resolution Queue to fix, and then sync the updates to Salsa Engage.

Rules When a Supporter Unsubscribes

If someone unsubscribes an email address that has more than one record in Engage, all of the records that share that same email address will be unsubscribed.

Manage Potential Duplicates

When you see the potential duplicate warning ( ! )...

1. Click Tools > Constituent Merge > Potential Duplicates from Online to review and handle duplicates.
   NOTE: the number in parentheses represents the total number of potential duplicates found.

2. The Potential Duplicate window opens and populates with up to the first 20 potential duplicates. More can be seen by clicking the arrow in the bottom right corner of the table.
   
   NOTE: The Activity column displays the form or email that was used to generate the supporter record. A blank value indicates the record was added manually or through an import.
   

3. Click the record that you want to process (so it is highlighted in yellow), and then click the Open... button. The Resolve Potential Duplicate wizard opens. You may also double-click the record you want to process. NOTE: be careful not to click the ID, which is a hyperlink to the constituent record.

4. To resolve, you may either keep the new constituent record or merge with one of the existing entries identified as potential duplicates.

5. Click Save and Next to move on to the next record (or click Save if there is no Save and Next option). Your changes will be saved in Salsa CRM and propagated to Salsa Engage according to the rules delineated in the rest of this article.

Common Scenarios

The following examples may give you a better idea of how proactive deduplication works.

Matching email and new first name, with only one record already in Salsa Engage with the given email—If an incoming supporter from a sign-up page updated his First Name from “Bill” to “William”, and his email matched one already in Salsa Engage, Salsa Engage will overwrite existing information with new information. This update would then be pushed down to Salsa CRM. If that record was already in Salsa CRM, Salsa CRM will update the First Name to William.

Matching email and a new address, with only one record already in Salsa Engage with the given email—If an incoming record has a matching email but an updated address, Engage will overwrite the existing address with the new address. Salsa Engage will then push the update down to Salsa CRM, and Salsa CRM will check if the latest data matches the existing data. If the first word and the zip code of the record do not match, the new address will become the primary address and the existing address will become a secondary address. If the first word and the zip code do match, Salsa CRM will update the pre-existing primary address with the newest data (for example, it may add a Suite number to Address Line 2).

Matching email and new last name (due to marriage), with only one record already in Salsa Engage with the given email—If an incoming record has a matching Email, but a different last name (for example, Henrietta Franklin at henriettaf@gmail.com comes in as Henrietta Jones at henriettaf@gmail.com ), Salsa Engage will overwrite the existing last name with the new last name. The updated record will be pushed down to Salsa CRM, which will update the last name in its database to the new last name.

New email is used by a supporter—If an incoming record has a unique email address but a First Name and Last Name matching a record that is already in Salsa Engage, Salsa Engage will create a new record. That record will then be pushed to Salsa CRM. Salsa CRM will flag it as a potential duplicate because at least one supporter with a matching first name and last name already exists in Salsa CRM.

New record with first name, last name, and email is added manually, by a campaign manager, to Salsa Engage, and there is a matching record in Salsa CRM—If a new record with a unique email address is added to Salsa Engage, Salsa Engage will create a new record and push it down to Salsa CRM. Salsa CRM will look up potential matches. If it finds an existing record that is a full match (first name, last name, and email), Salsa CRM will overwrite the existing record and then sync back up to Salsa Engage.

New record in Salsa Engage and potential matches on first name and last name in Salsa CRM—If a new record is added to Salsa Engage, Salsa Engage will create a new record and push it down to Salsa CRM. If Salsa CRM finds one or more records with the same first and last name, you will be notified and given the option to merge the records. If you merge the records in Salsa CRM, Salsa CRM will prompt Salsa Engage to merge the records. The merged record in Salsa Engage will be identical to the merged record in Salsa CRM.

Multiple records exist with the same email address—If more than one record exists in Salsa Engage with the same email address, Salsa Engage will look at the First and Last Name of the incoming record and compare it to the duplicates that share the email address. If Salsa Engage doesn't find a match, it will create an additional duplicate using the new First and Last Name and existing email. It will then push the new "duplicate" record down to Salsa CRM. Salsa CRM will then treat it as a new record and look for any potential duplicates. If any duplicates are found, they will be flagged as potential matches for the campaign manager to resolve in the Potential Duplicates from Online list.