Merging duplicate donors

Find it: Left nav → Donors → open a donor → Merge · Who can use it: Org Admins / CDOs only. Development Associates can flag a suspected duplicate for an admin to handle (see below).

What you'll see

Merging is a careful, three-step flow on one screen:

1. Find the duplicate. Starting from one donor, search by name, organization, or email for the record to merge with them. The search is alias-aware — a donor's secondary/alias emails are matched too, so a duplicate that used a different email still surfaces.
2. Pick the survivor. Two cards show both records side by side, with each one's lifetime giving and gift count. Click the card you want to keep — the other is labeled will be merged away.
3. Choose the winning value for each field, then confirm.

How to merge two records

1. Open either donor's profile and choose Merge, then search for and select the duplicate.
2. Click the card of the record to keep as the survivor.
3. In the field-by-field table, each row shows both records' values with a radio button under each — pick which one the survivor should keep (first/last name, organization, address, phone, capacity rating, notes, and more). Rows where both records already agree are dimmed; there's nothing to choose.
4. Under Primary email, choose which address is primary. The other becomes an alias — mail to either still reaches the survivor.
5. If the two records are in different households, pick which household the survivor belongs to.
6. Read the preview banner — it spells out exactly how many gifts, interactions, and receipts will move — then click Review & merge.
7. In the confirmation box, type MERGE to confirm.

What actually happens

• Everything re-points to the survivor: gift history, interactions, tasks, receipts, portal login/identity, household membership, committee assignments, and email aliases all move over. Nothing is stranded on the old record.
• Issued receipts are never altered. A receipt already froze the donor's name and address as they were the day it was sent, so historical Receipts stay exactly as issued — legally and for your audit trail. The merge only re-links which donor they belong to.
• The losing record is tombstoned, not deleted. Old links and bookmarks to it automatically redirect to the survivor, so nothing 404s.
• The whole merge is audit-logged — a full snapshot of both records is saved before anything changes.

Flagging a suspected duplicate

If you're a Development Associate (or just not ready to merge yet), use Flag duplicate to mark two records as a possible match. This creates a task for an Org Admin to review and merge later — a safe way to surface dupes without touching data yourself.

Good to know

• A merge cannot be automatically undone. That's why you type MERGE to confirm and why the audit-log snapshot exists — recovery would be a manual restore from that snapshot. Take a moment to pick the right survivor and the right field values before confirming.
• A clean, single record is the foundation of correct giving history, tier, and ask math. Two half-records mean an undercounted lifetime total and a wrong recommended ask — merging fixes both at once.
• The snapshot-plus-tombstone design is deliberate: it protects legal and audit integrity (issued receipts are untouched, and the merge is fully recorded) while still giving you one clean donor going forward.

See Also

• Donors
• Receipts