Oops, I renamed myself
A client had a problem last week:
They found a few contacts whose history and data seemed to be mysteriously incorrect.
One example: a familiar contact, "Marcus Williams" was missing from the system, and in his place was a new contact named "Cindy Barker", one of Marcus' employees.
Oddly, except for the name and a few contact details, the record for Cindy matched what my client remembered about Marcus — donation history, event participations, and more.
And it wasn’t just Marcus/Cindy. Similar patterns appeared with other contacts.
The headache:
Obviously this kind of data inconsistency is disconcerting. This client was starting to doubt the accuracy of all of their CRM data.
Once the cause was found, the client and I spent several hours identifying and correcting affected records (most of that time was the client, making manual data corrections).
The cause:
With a little effort we were able to reproduce the problem and identify the cause. It goes like this:
Marcus logged into his member account.
He opened the online registration form for the upcoming conference event.
CiviCRM dutifully pre-populated that form with Marcus’ name and contact info.
Here’s the kicker: Marcus was not trying to register himself for the event. He wanted to register Cindy, his employee.
So he edited the first and last name fields to say Cindy Brown.
He thought he was just registering Cindy.
What he actually did was rename himself in the CRM.
The long term fix:
We installed "No Overwrite" extension. Problem solved.
This extension deserves a write-up of its own, which I won't do here. But here's a link.
The lessons:
Mysterious inconsistencies don't mean your entire CRM is broken.
But they do deserve quick attention.
Reproducing the bad behavior is critical to identifying the cause and ensuring a fix.
The No Overwrite extension is awesome.
All the best,
A.