Our system uses either a contact record’s email address or full mailing address as a “unique identifier.” This means that those two fields are considered an individual piece of information about a contact that’s unique to that particular person or organization.

When you’re adding donation or contact records, if you include an email and address for one contact records that shares that information with a second, separate contact, the system will assume that the two contacts are the same, and merge the records.

While the primary email address for a contact must be unique – meaning no other contact can have the same primary email address – the secondary and work email addresses can be shared by two or more contacts. In other words, those email addresses being shared between contacts won’t necessarily cause them to be flagged as duplicates.

However, if two contact records share a mailing address or a phone number, but not both, then our system will “flag” both contacts as being a potential duplicate.

Donor Management will provide an alert when potential duplicates are found, so that you can review the records and confirm that they are indeed duplicates – or that they should remain separate contacts.