The process starts with you creating a List in NationBuilder. You might choose to create a List with your entire database, or you can create a list excluding people that you don't want de-duplicated (high value donors, VIP supporters, etc.)

For a record to be eligible for de-duplication, they need to have a first and last name. Depending on the options you choose, they may also need a phone number or an address.

There are some limitations on who can be merged, which gets pretty specific and technical. Feel free to contact us if you have questions about that.

Deduplicator will create an Export from the List you created, and import the data for processing.

Then we'll analyze the records to identify the potential duplicates. Once it's done, you'll have an opportunity to remove or edit matches before continuing with the automatic merging process.

If you have any questions along the way, you can contact us.

You don't pay anything to run the initial analysis and see what duplicates are found, so feel free to try it out.

To access the full duplicate report and merger tool, it costs $0.25 CAD per match found.

Matches will be found if their names match exactly and they have the same zip, address, phone number, or canonical email address.

Matches will also be found if their names are similar enough to be a match. For example, the names "Barack Obama" and "Barack H. Obama" are not exactly the same, but they are close enough that we would consider them a match.

Matches can also be found if one record has an empty phone or address, and the other record has a phone or address.

If both records have a date of birth, it must match. If both records have any unique IDs (eg. External ID, Salesforce ID, etc.), they must match, unless you disable that option below.

If you have any questions along the way, you can contact us.

Once you've reviewed the matches and started merging records, each match will be sent to NationBuilder's Merger API. NationBuilder will merge the "Matching Record" into the "Primary Record". Generally speaking, if both records have some data in the same field (eg. name, employer, etc.), the Primary Record's data will be kept and the Match Record's data will be erased.

Email addresses will never be overwritten or erased. If the two records have a total of more than 4 email addresses, the merger will fail.

If both records have a value in the same address field (ie. Home Address), the Primary Record's address will be kept.

At the end of the automatic merger process, you will get a report of which mergers failed, and the reason why. That will allow you to manually resolve those issues and merge the records.

To effectively analyze your database for duplicates, Deduplicator imports the signups' names, addresses, phone numbers and other data points. This data is only used for the purpose of finding duplicates.

The supporter data from incomplete dedupe processes is deleted after 14 days, and after 30 days for completed dedupe processes.

If you would like any data deleted sooner, contact us at [email protected].

Hi, I'm Alex 👋🏻. I'm a Certified NationBuilder Developer and Partner. I've been building things with NationBuilder for nearly a decade.

I also built Tagomations, a platform for automating all kinds of things with your NationBuilder data.

Learn more about me here.