Efficient Way to Find Duplicate Users

Hello, 


Our GD platform has thousands of users, and we often miss the individuals that create multiple accounts. We have a tedious process to find the duplicate users within the system. We've recruited volunteers to occasionally find these volunteers and merge the accounts, but it takes time to train new volunteers and/or employees to find the duplicate users in the system. 


We suggest an ability for the system to filter out the duplicate users and alert the site managers that a duplicate account may have been created. Maybe this could be added to a filter or a report. 


We'd be happy to discuss this further. Thank you for your support. 


Best,

Seth Anderson 

Second Harvest Heartland


1 person likes this idea

Hi Seth, 


Thanks for writing in! The trick with deduplicating accounts is coming up with a list of criteria is likely to correctly identify duplicates. One way to solve this would be to add some options to the user filters for things linke names and phone numbers that check and see whether there is another account that shares some somilar data. 


This way, you could run the user filter and enter User Data > Phone Number > Duplicate Phone number and get a list of all accounts that share a phone number with another account on the site. 


This would definitely be in scope for an enhancement request, do you think this would help you to meaningfully address this problem? 


Let me know what you think! 



Hi Eli, 


I like where you're going with this! I think using a "duplicate" filter for certain information can help us find duplicate users a lot faster. I like the idea of using the phone numbers.


Some additional data that we look at when combing through the excel sheets are birthdays and addresses. 


The only worry we have is if a user mistypes a number for their phone number or letter for their name. We're also wondering if a user types extra spaces before or after their name would affect it. 


Overall, I think this is a great idea and could help!


-Seth 

Thanks fo much for following up, and for your suggestions for additional duplicate criteria! I will make sure that these also get considered as part of this feature request. 


Have a great day! 


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