Scanning for duplicate contacts — in your sleep

Do you make a regular practice of scanning for duplicate contacts in your CRM?

Rather like flossing your teeth, this is both not-exactly fun, and a valuable practice that will save you a lot of headaches.

But if you have more than a few hundred contacts, you may find that the scanning itself can be a bit of trouble:

• Scanning across all contacts takes forever, and it can even lock up or crash your site.

• You can of course set the scan to compare only a portion of your contacts, but breaking them up into small chunks is a tedious process.

• The scanning itself is rather tedious; it's a bit of chore to sit there waiting for the scan results to load in your browser — and if you can't process them all in one sitting, you'll have to repeat that scan again later.

I know several organizations where staff, facing these challenges, have just avoided scanning for duplicates, or put it off as long as possible. Meanwhile the number of duplicate contacts just keeps growing, which will make future scans take even longer.

If that's your situation, you might want to have a look at the Dedupe Monitor extension. It scans for duplicates while you sleep, is careful not to crash your site while doing it, and then alerts you to any duplicate candidates that the scans have identified.

Your staff can then review those duplicate candidates, and use CiviCRM's standard duplicate-merge features to either merge them or mark them as "not a dulicate."

It's been in use by several organizations for over a year now, and they're reporting great results, trimming down litterally thousands of duplicate contacts out of their systems.

You can learn more about it in this blog post on civicrm.org: Dedupe Monitor: Easy Dedupe Scanning Across All Contacts

All the best,
A.