Non-Profit Process Considerations

Anonymous Households

In many cases, you will find that your Contact duplicates have independent Accounts/Households associated which are also duplicated.

In Salesforce, when duplicate Contacts are merged, the Account/Household from the non-master record is very often left empty (without any Contacts associated). When using NPSP, if there are no Contacts associated, the Account/Household is automatically renamed to ‘Anonymous Household’.
See more details here.

When this happens, you are left with a number of orphaned Accounts/Households that you are needing to find and eliminate via merge or mass delete after the Contact merges have completed. This can be a challenge if your Account/Household lacks data that enables you to easily find and identify the matches by any other field values that are not the Account Name. Sometimes the Contact record contains the majority of the data and would help to identify the Account/Household matches (rather than matching data on the Household itself).

Cloudingo offers a hybrid-merge that will automatically merge the Accounts/Households associated with the Contacts being merged so that both objects are being merged simultaneously (avoiding the empty Account post-Contact merge).

Figure 1

Merging Duplicate Contacts in Salesforce

(Fig. 1) In Salesforce, when duplicate Contacts are merged that have separate Households, the associated Households are merged separately. In this example, the master Contact (C1) is associated to a Household (A1) and the non-master Contact (C2) is associated to a different (but also duplicate) Household (A2).

The non-master Contact (C2) merges into the master Contact (C1). The master Contact record's Account is retained (A1). The non-master Contact record's Account is disassociated and left without any Contacts (A2). Salesforce NPSP recognizes the empty Account (no Contact records) and renames the Household to Anonymous Household.

Merging Duplicate Contacts Using Cloudingo Hybrid Merge (Hybrid Filter)

Figure 2(Fig. 2) In Cloudingo, if you have the hybrid merge feature enabled, the duplicate Accounts/Households are automatically merged when the Contact duplicates are merged. In this example, the Contact non-master record (C2) merges into the Contact master record (C1). At the same time, the Contact non-master record's Account (A2) merges into the Contact master record's Account (A1). It performs both the Contact & Account merges simultaneously, avoiding empty Accounts without Contacts associated when the Contact merge is performed. 

Enabling Hybrid Merge (Hybrid Filter)

If your license already includes the ability to enable hybrid merge, you will simply edit the filter(s) you wish to apply the hybrid merge to.

Navigate to your main Dedupe dashboard, click the desired Contact filter's menu option and choose 'Edit'. 

Choose the 'Merge Related Direct Accounts' option in tab 1 of the filter configuration. You will also notice that you have a second rule option available where you can choose the default 'Rule to merge account records'. The rule chosen will determine which Account/Household is retained during merge. This means that it does not always end up being your master Contact record's Account/Household, it will follow the rule master definition.

Repeat these steps for any additional Contact filters that you wish to enable the hybrid merge. 

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Nonprofit Best Practices & Considerations

Hybrid Merge