Having analysed an export of our NationBuilder data, it apparent that we have a large number of duplicate records, more than can be managed by merging one by one.
Is it possible to indicate on my NationBuilder import file that these records are duplicates? i.e. nationbuilder_id 10558 is a duplicate of nationbuilder_id 882
The best thing to do in that situation is to replace nationbuilder_id 10558 with nationbuilder_id 882. The importer will then identify those two rows as the same person.
When you do the import, add a tag (ex: "import dedupes") to the records. All of the new, merged records will have this tag, and you can delete the records that do not have the tag as a method of cleaning out the now-redundant records.
Lastly, I would recommend not checking "overwrite existing data." Instead of overwriting, the importer will add data from 10558 to 882.
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Hines Digital
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Thanks for your response. It looks like a really good work around :-)
=HYPERLINK(CONCATENATE("<a href="https://slug.nationbuilder.com/admin/signups/">https://slug.nationbuilder.com/admin/signups/</a>",A1,"/mergers/",B1,"/edit"))=HYPERLINK)
you need to replace slug with you nations slug
Requirements:
- you can use excel to locate contacts you want to merge, with nationbuilder ids for source and destination contacts in separate columns.
Solution: use excel to create merging links for these contacts
- note: replace with your nations slug
- you have source contact nationbuilder id in one column (A1) and destination nationbuilder id in a second column (B1)
- into column C1 plave the following code
=HYPERLINK(CONCATENATE("https://.nationbuilder.com/admin/signups/",A1,"/mergers/",B1,"/edit"))- note: if you click this link in Excel it will open the page, but will require you to log into your nation each time.
If you cut and paste the resulting hyperlink into your web browser it will merge the two contacts (assuming you are already logged into your nation). In the event that there is a merge conflict it will ask you to resolve it.
Using this solution I can do about 10 merges a minute depending on how fast I am with keyboard shortcuts to cut and paste.
Taking this one step further, you can take the list of hyperlinks and create a bookmark import file for you browser, import the bookmarks into a new folder and then open all the bookmarks in a new window. This will save you a lot of cutting and pasting but be aware that your computer will take a while to process these (it took about 1hr to do 1700) and might crash your browser if you do to many at once.
Feel free to contact me with questions and share if you have a faster way to merge contacts.