How To Clean Up Your Contact Database

In this lesson, we will discuss housekeeping tips and tricks for maintaining a clean database. Performing tasks outlined in this lesson will help you prepare your database on the front end to make the process smooth and easy when it’s time to generate contribution statements for your donors.

Topics we will cover in this lesson include:

• Contribution Reports [0:30]
  One of the easiest ways to begin cleaning your data in Aplos is utilizing the Donations by Contact report or the Donations by Household report. These reports are great for providing an overview of who is contributing to your organization. They will also help you identify and verify the accuracy of people’s contact information and contributions. Go to your reports in Aplos. View the resource for generating reports.
• Contact List Report [2:04]
  If you wish to drill down into your entire contact database, the Contact List report is a great way to see your data at a granular level. You can view and work with built-in and custom fields, lists, and relationship information to make this report even more robust. Go to the Contact List report in Aplos. View the resource for generating reports.
• Merging Duplicates [3:37]
  Utilizing reports can help you locate duplicate profiles for the same contact. Consolidate contact information found in duplicate profiles with our Merge Contact tool to ensure their information resides in only a single profile. Identify duplicate contacts in Aplos. View the resource for merging contacts.
• Address Verification
  Address Verification is a fantastic tool that can reduce the hidden cost of wasted postage on returned mail. It will also save you time on editing contacts and chasing down new addresses. We’ll look at how Aplos automatically checks your contacts’ primary addresses nightly against the USPS database to standardize the address format and update addresses when people have moved. Then we’ll review Address Verification in more detail in the next lesson of this course.