How duplicate merging works on import

Everyone has duplicate contacts, they are as common as flies at your summer picnic. Rest assured, ContactDrive looks for duplicates in several ways so you can rest easy knowing that those pesky dupes are kept at bay.

ContactDrive checks several fields to determine if the contact being imported is already in your workspace using the guidelines below:

1. ContactDrive ID: If your import contains a ContactDrive ID for a contact currently in your workspace, that contact will be updated with the imported data.
2. External ID: You can create custom fields in your workspace that contain a Unique ID from another system, then import data with that ID and check for matches. These can include voter ID or other IDs added from other systems that you use.
3. Name AND (not or) email: The system will not count a duplicate if only email address matches. It is not uncommon for a couple to share an email address, or for a staffer to enter data from a form using their own email. Checking that both email and name match helps to decrease the possibility of an erroneous duplication. When checking for name, it checks both first and nickname fields. This improves the match rate if you use first name for your contacts legal name, as well as a nickname commonly used for salutations.
4. Name AND phone number: For users working with SMS campaigns, we check for duplicates matching a name and phone number.
5. Name only matching: On each import, by default the option to "skip name-only matching" is enabled. You can disable this skip, which will obviously turn on matching based solely on your contacts' names. This matches contacts from that import with any contact in your workspace that shares the same name. While this can be helpful for small lists, it is strongly not-advised for large lists as it's likely to erroneously merge contacts who have the same name but are in fact different people. That's why we skip this step by default, but if you're sure... go for it.

Now you know the many ways ContactDrive strives to keep your data neat and tidy so you can be efficient with your time, energy, and keep relationships from falling through the cracks! No pesky flies, here!