Tag Archives: The Mergician

Global Merge More Accurately with The Mergician

We have just released an update to our successful global merge utility The Mergician. We have always had a way of searching for records in The Raiser’s Edge using complex and flexible criteria. IDLookup was one of the first plug-ins that we ever wrote and since it was first developed it has grown to contain some of the most powerful look up criteria around. A year or two ago we created IDLookup Dedupe, making use of IDLookup to search your database for duplicates. Well now we have gone one step further and brought all of this flexible, customization and downright lovely criteria lookup into The Mergician giving everybody the power to choose exactly how they dedupe their data.

There are 20 fields to choose from, many of which you can decide whether or not to search by the whole word or a specific number of characters. You can search using soundex (where names like Johnson and Jonson would be matched), you can search using first name and address line equivalents so that names like Bill match on William and Bvd match on Boulevard. If you are feeling very adventurous you can change the collation so that accented names would match with or without the accents e.g. Édouard would match Edouard.

Not only can you set up one criteria set, but you can set up multiples. You can decide that you want to narrow down the matches made from one to the next or you can decide that you want to select the criteria set with the fewest matches.

The Mergician still supports The Raiser’s Edge own dedupe algorithm so you can continue to create your merge report using that. You can also use our simple email matching tool too or you can use a third party agency to do the matching for you. However using our latest matching engine will give you real flexibility to match based on your own data without having to rely on mysterious algorithms or scoring charts.

Find out more about The Mergician or download the trial version today.

An upgrade to The Mergician

I am really pleased to announce an update to The Mergician that will help all UK users of The Mergician.

Previously whenever you have merged two constituents with Gift Aid Declarations the value of in the source field on the GAD has not been transferred across to the merged record.

We now do this automatically for you whenever you select to merge Gift Aid Declarations. We know how much of a pain this has been in the past where you have had to do this manually.

The Mergician is not just a global merging tool. It cleans up after the merge too where The Raiser’s Edge merge tool leaves unfinished business. The addition of the source code field being copied over adds to the feature set of The Mergician that we hope you all appreciate. Of course if you have any suggestions of improvements then we would be happy to hear them.

The upgrade to version 1.8 is available after logging into your ZeidZone account on zeidman.info for all those organisations on a maintenance plan.

Flexible dedupe of The Raiser’s Edge database with IDLookup Dedupe

We are really pleased to announce IDLookup Dedupe. You can now take the power of IDLookup and apply it to the whole or part of your database. We have known for a while now that many IDLookup users dedupe their database with IDLookup. They export their whole database to Excel and then run IDLookup through it. Now the process got a whole lot simpler. Just select a query of records to dedupe (you can set up the query to run over the whole database) select your criteria sets, select your custom output fields and press start. Depending on the size of your database and the number of criteria sets IDLookup Dedupe will produce an output file of duplicate records in no time, ok it will probably take a while but it will be worth it!

The output format is then able to feed straight into The Mergician so that you can global merge records based on your duplicate file.

Not so that those who use The Mergician feel left out, we have also added the custom output format to The Mergician too. You can now add almost any field on the constituent record to the output and compare each record on a separate row.

IDLookup  is an extra module for IDLookup at no extra cost to those on maintenance.

Check out IDLookup

Check out The Mergician

 

Oh and if you have not already done so vote for Chimpegration for the Digital Fundraising Awards (no email or registration required)

Checking Constituents for a NetCommunity Login

I have been developing some updates for The Mergician. There are some nice additions coming soon including clean up of duplicate attributes and appeals following the merge. However one item that has been added is the request to select a record as the primary constituent if it has a NetCommunity Login associated with it. Continue reading Checking Constituents for a NetCommunity Login

Multiple Versions of The Raiser’s Edge Open at one time

I am currently working on a project involving two different Raiser’s Edge databases. One of the problems that I thought that I would have was having to first open one instance of Raiser’s Edge only to find that I needed a piece of information from the other one. I would have to exit and sign out of the one and then log in to the other one. This to-ing and fro-ing, I thought, would drive me crazy.

Continue reading Multiple Versions of The Raiser’s Edge Open at one time

Globally Merge Constituents using The Mergician

If you did not get Zeidman Development’s newsletter (you can sign up here) then you would not have heard about our latest plug-in – The Mergician.  The Mergician allows you to merge constituent records en masse. Currently The Raiser’s Edge allows you to merge two records together. Built off of the same functionality, The Mergician allows you to merge all your duplicates in one process. Continue reading Globally Merge Constituents using The Mergician