Online Duplicate Checking

When a constituent submits a transaction through your Cart, eCommerce, or Personal Fundraising web page, eTapestry searches your database to check for an existing account. The duplicate check is based on the account name, street address, and email address information and begins when the website visitor clicks Submit on the page.

The match does not need to be exact. For example, the name “Bob Smith” matches the account name “Bob and Mary Smith” because “Bob” and “Smith” are found within “Bob and Mary Smith”.
When a name field contains one character, the field is skipped. For example, “Bob J Smith,” matches “Bob Smith” because "J" is skipped.
eTapestry skips punctuation. For example, “Bob Smith Sr.” matches “Bob Smith Sr” because the period is skipped.
Within an address field, items that indicate the type of road are skipped. These include "ave", "avenue", "av", "avenue" , "blvd", "boulevard", "cir", "circle", "ct", "court", "dr", "drive", "hwy", "highway", "ln", "lane", "lp", "loop", "pk", "park", "pt", "point", "rd", "road", "rt", "route", "sq", "square", "st", "street", "wy", and "way." For example, "123 Oak Dr" will match "123 Oak Drive" and "123 Oak."
All searches and comparisons are based on blocks of text. For example, "bob@example.com" matches "bob@example.com, mary@example.com" because "bob@example.com" is included in "bob@example.com, mary@example.com."

When a duplicate is merged based on a transaction from a Cart, eCommerce, or Personal Fundraising page, eTapestry adds a note to the constituent's journal. The note includes persona information the website visitor entered on your web page, but the information does not add to the database. Also, the existing account name and the submitted account name both appear in the note. We recommend you regularly run a query and report to review these duplicate merges and identify personas and name changes you may want to update. To do this, create a query for the note content. Next, create a report that shows the information you want to review, such as the first name, last name, account number, persona fields, and the note content.

To improve duplicate matching for your constituents, we recommend the following.

When an eCommerce page asks for a middle name, change it to ask for the middle initial. Alternatively, you can eliminate the middle name field.
When you run the Online Journal Entries Report, select the option to check for duplicates. This may identify duplicates that were overlooked by this automatic duplicate checking process.
To encourage website visitors to enter information consistently, include verbiage on your web page that asks them to enter the same name and address information that is on file with their bank.
If a specific website visitor consistently enters name and address information differently than how it appears in your database, update your database to reflect the information the constituent uses on your web page.