Non-Profits Realize The Power Of DemandTools!

Data is on the forefront of any business decision-making process. From sources to research to marketing, organizations collect data both intentionally and unintentionally. If a business makes the decision not to de-duplicate constituent data, it costs-time, money and more importantly…quality information. While de-duplicating data may be time consuming and expensive for traditional non-profits, there are other very real advantages such as increased donor retention, new donor discovery opportunities through streamlined communications processes.

De-duplicating your data is a key question for nonprofit organizations who have to make sure their people are connected in the most cost-effective way. By consolidating your data, you can reduce the number of complex connections and strategize about how best to upsell, upmarket, and cross sell with lower risk.

A robust duplicate management tool might save money as it will effectively reduce the number of resources you are spending on duplicates. Let’s look at the costs and time linked to duplicates that you might not be aware of:

• Increased mailing costs
• Increased number of users in Salesforce for duplicate management.
• Multiple interaction with the same contact unknowingly
• Hundreds of hours invested in manual reconciliation of data

Well, you are not the only one with repetitive data–duplicates are a common problem. The best defense is a great dedupe strategy. We’re going to look at why Duplicates happen in Salesforce, Which objects result in worst duplicates and how you can take control of duplicates with DemandTools.

Why Duplicates Happen in Salesforce?

Many companies rely on the services provided by Salesforce to organize their data and keep it safe. The system is flexible, open, and provides different ways to store data. This makes it easy for people to create duplicates of what they have done. For example, when you create a record in Salesforce it can be done by three different users with different contact or email. It’s easy to create duplicates manually, let’s look at the others way that can create duplicate in Salesforce.

• Data loader imports
• Data Migration
• Through Integrations
• Through Manual data entry

Which Objects in Salesforce lead to worst Duplication?

There are many objects in Salesforce, and each object has a different attribute. The most likely places for duplicate data to happen is in the core objects such as accounts, contacts, leads, and affiliations.

Can Salesforce detect duplicates?

When duplicates occur Salesforce has a process that will find and handle them properly. Matching rules match contacts to separate individuals with the same phone number or email. However, duplicate rules in Salesforce are a great help, but they are not enough.

How to clean up duplicate records in Salesforce?

When you have a lot of sales reps at your business, it’s easy to get duplicated records in your Salesforce account because each sales agent is assigned to their own contact record. One way to clean up this mess is by selecting the contacts related list in an account and merging them together. It will ask you which records you want to merge so that only one exists for each of the inputs. Delegating one contact record as the master record will keep the rest of the records separate, even if they have different names or phone numbers. The fields you decide to keep will also be transferred over to their relevant fields with new values.

Why do you need a Duplicate Management Strategy?

Salesforce is a tool that is designed to help you manage your efforts in sales, marketing, customer service and more. However, it can be easy to create duplicates of records when using Salesforce. As more and more data are fed into Salesforce, more duplicates, such as duplicate contacts and duplicate leads are being introduced into the system. To repair, reduce or remove these dupes for both sales and support teams, companies need to have a duplicate management strategy. A strategically executed duplicate management strategy can minimize issues with the system, increase performance after implementation, and enhance customer satisfaction when you simplify actions needed by sales.

Whether you are a small business with just 1 user or a salesforce.com enterprise, you can benefit greatly from managing duplicate records in your Salesforce org.

Take Control Over Duplicates with DemandTools

Consider the time and frustration you have spent with working over duplicate records in your Salesforce account! Enhance your productivity by using DemandTools to remove unnecessary duplicates.

DemandTools allows you to mass merge duplicate CRM records, mass update, and mass reassign ownership. DemandTools has been designed with a range of features that make it very efficient for organizations looking for a tool to handle their Salesforce data quality needs.

DemandTools consists of 10+ individual modules, including Controls, Standardize, De-Duplicate, Import and Manage Data module. DemandTools is a client-based application that Salesforce administrators install on their Microsoft Windows computer. The installation process for DemandTools is fairly simple and doesn’t require any complicated configuring before users can begin to dedupe the data. The various modules provide users with a variety of tools for managing data quality in the environment. These tools can be applied to both Salesforce and Force.com.

DemandTools is a very flexible tool, which allows you to decide on how you want to search for matches or duplicates. You can for example define matches on:

• First Name, Last Name and Phone
• First Name, Last Name and Country
• First Name, Last Name and Email
• First Name, Last Name and Zip

And there are many combinations that you can make as per your business requirement.

How A Non-Profit Leveraged the Power of DemandTools?

An international Nonprofit was looking to clean up their duplicated data. They were using Salesforce NPSP package for managing their data, and despite using the Salesforce duplicate rules, they were facing challenges of dealing with Duplicate accounts and contacts and more. They found that they had a lot of duplicate data in their Salesforce NPSP. They didn’t have much time or resources for manual work, as well as manual work is error prone, so they wanted a better way to get rid of the duplicates.

Webuters team found that using Salesforce DemandTools for NPSP and can also benefit other areas of the company. We suggested Salesforce DemandTools as the perfect tool for their needs. It had all the capabilities necessary to handle the removal of duplicates, and it did so quickly with little effort.

We successfully implemented the DemandTools and built the scenarios working with the client based on business needs. All of the scenarios were run using DemandTools to help the business get rid of thousands of duplicate data, which also helped in freeing up the storage space consumed by these duplicates.

Now, as the non-profit has the scenarios built and DemandTools implemented, it’s easy to get rid of duplicate contacts, accounts and more on the go.

Backup is Important When you Dedupe!

When running a deduplication and cleanup process, many companies come across the situation where they lose data. If there is sensitive data that cannot be recovered from backups, then this can cause costly issues for the company. To avoid such issues, pre-planning and completing a backup of the desired data is often recommended. Some key objects to include in the backup are: users, fields, companies and macros, automation rules, packages and queues, custom objects and related objects.

You can take a backup using Salesforce Weekly Exports or using a Salesforce backup and recovery tool like Archive on Cloud. As tempting as it might be to eliminate a few duplicates, accidents happen that could lead to disaster unless there is a recent backup. Patience is the key here but so is a healthy dose of prevention!

Are You Using DemandTools?

Demand Tools is a wonderful dedupe tool that can with multiple screnerios help you get rid of duplicate data. Some find the learning curve can be a bit steep for DemandTools and the software is Windows only, but it’s packed with powerful features. One of the most powerful feature of DemandTools is that it can also de-duplicate custom objects.

DemandTools come with built-in scenarios for Salesforce objects like Accounts and Contacts that usually are not enough for nonprofit data, so you’ll have to build your matching scenarios from scratch. You need to have a right Salesforce consultant working with you for building and testing the matching rules. Doing so will also be useful later in preventing new duplicates.

And . . . if you’ve not spent time building great NPSP-compatible matching rules, Webuters is here to help you. Our team is skilled at Salesforce and DemandTools. We can optimize NPSP and implement DemandTools in many different ways to fit the needs of our clients. Don’t let your team spend a lot of time in integrating Excel spreadsheets with Salesforce, DemandTools is all you need.  

Want to know how Demandtools can help increase productivity and save you time? Connect with our team at Webuters.