Donor Duplicate Detection
Use Donor Duplicate Detection when you need to clean up donor records that may represent the same person or organization. The Duplicates tab helps you scan one donor form at a time, review suggested duplicate groups, choose the record to keep, merge duplicate records, and undo eligible merge batches from merge history.
Open Donors from the sidebar, then select Duplicates.
Choose the Donor Form to Clean Up
Start by choosing the donor form that contains the records you want to review. Duplicate scans and merge history are scoped to the selected form.
Open Donors.
Select the Duplicates tab.
Use Form to choose the donor profile/form you want to scan.
If no donor form is available, duplicate detection cannot run from this page. Your role also needs duplicate-detection management access or donor-management access to see and use this tab.
Run a Duplicate Scan
Use a scan when you want Gratona to refresh the suggested duplicate groups for the selected donor form.
You can choose:
Basic Scan: checks for donors that match on username, email, and the donor display name for the selected form.
Enhanced Scan: uses the saved detection rules for the form, including field weights, comparators, similarity threshold, fuzzy matching, normalization, excluded fields, and incremental processing settings.
After you start a scan, Gratona shows scan progress with processed donors and duplicate groups found. When the scan finishes, results refresh on the page and the user who started the scan receives an email notification.
Running a scan refreshes the duplicate suggestions for the selected form. Review the results before merging because a suggestion still needs human confirmation.
Review Suggested Duplicate Groups
Each row in Scanned Duplicates represents a group of records that may belong to the same donor. The table can show:
Action
Username
Email
Count
Oldest Record
contribution totals when those columns are enabled
custom donor-form fields when those columns are enabled
Use Search duplicates when you need to find a possible match by donor identity details.
Use Columns when you want to compare more information before deciding whether records belong together.
Use Filters when you need to narrow duplicate groups by a field value, blank field, or contribution amount.
Choose the Record to Keep
Before you merge, open the duplicate group and choose the donor record that should remain active.
In a duplicate group, open Actions.
Select Show Duplicates.
Review the records in the expanded group.
Select the checkbox for the donor that should be kept as the primary record.
The selected donor becomes the primary record. Gratona keeps that donor active and merges the other records into it. The selected donor's payment method is the one used when merged details are combined.
Merge Duplicate Donors
Use Merge Selected only after you have confirmed the records represent the same donor and have selected the primary record.
When a merge runs, Gratona:
keeps the selected donor as the primary record
fills blank primary donor fields from secondary records when values are available
fills blank custom donor fields from secondary records when values are available
moves donations, commitments, sponsorship links, and activity logs from secondary donors to the primary donor
soft-deletes the secondary donor records
recalculates the primary donor's giving totals and refreshes donor cache data
Merge processing runs as a tracked batch. A progress bar shows how many merge operations have processed, succeeded, or failed.
Mark Records as Not Duplicate
Use Mark as Not Duplicate when a suggested group is not actually the same donor.
Open the duplicate group.
Select the donor record you want to remove from duplicate suggestions.
Open Actions.
Select Mark as Not Duplicate.
Gratona removes active duplicate links for that donor in the selected form, so the matching group no longer appears in the current duplicate results.
Review and Undo Merge History
Use Merge History when you need to review merge batches, check their status, or undo a completed merge batch that is still eligible for undo.
The history table shows:
Batch ID
Status
Merges
Progress
Date
Merged Donor
available actions
Select Undo when a completed batch needs to be reversed. Undo restores the soft-deleted donor records and moves donations, commitments, sponsorship links, and activity logs back to their original donors when the original assignment data is available.
If a batch has already been undone, Restore re-applies that merge and moves the records back to the primary donor.
Adjust Detection Rules
Use Detection Rules when the enhanced scan is finding too many weak matches or missing likely duplicates for a specific donor form.
You can adjust:
Enabled: turns the saved rule set on or off for the selected form.
Similarity Threshold: sets how strong the overall match needs to be. Higher values require a stronger match.
Field Configuration: controls each field's weight and comparator.
Comparators: include exact, normalized, fuzzy, and phonetic matching.
Fuzzy Matching Settings: controls minimum fuzzy similarity and fuzzy matching options.
Normalization Settings: controls case sensitivity, whitespace trimming, punctuation removal, and phone normalization.
Incremental Processing: scans donors created or updated since a recent successful scan, plus donors already in duplicate groups.
Excluded Fields: removes fields from enhanced duplicate matching.
Select Save Rules after changing the rule set. Run an enhanced scan again to apply the updated rules to duplicate suggestions.
Permissions
Your role controls whether you can open the Duplicates tab, run scans, change detection rules, merge donors, mark records as not duplicate, or undo merge batches. If the tab or an action is missing, your role may not include duplicate-detection management or donor-management access.
Related Guides
Last updated