It's a new year and we've opened VBS signups! So now the duplicates are rolling in. We have this same issue for other events, but there isn't the vast attendance for those like there is for VBS. Throughout the year is regular maintenance, but currently the duplicates from VBS are already overwhelming. Any news on this??

How many votes does it typically take to get an issue resolved. This one would be very helpful and make BB more tolerable.

UPDATE #2: We have Awana registration going on and we are going to see if we make the registrant be the parent name only, then added participation options for child name and information below it. I am attaching the screenshots so you can see. Here is hoping we have resolved the duplicate issue.

I still think blackbaud should talk to blackbaud and recognize the duplicates.

Update: We have found a common denominator in why we have duplicates on our registration forms. It seems to be only for parents registering kids and also making a payment. We offered a purchase for t-shirts on our VBS registration and those are the duplicates we have in the system. We are going to try breaking up payments for things on one form by parent name only. Then create an additional form for child registration for our next event and see if that helps.

We had a Youth event during the week of VBS and none of the Youth event kids were duplicated and the only difference was that we had payments for t-shirts on one form and no payments on the youth form. So there is a shift in the algorithm for payments that is creating the duplicates.

We experienced the same issue when we had families register their kids for VBS. There are duplicates in our system if parents registered with anything even the slightest different than what is already in our system.

When I sent an email to all the parents who registered, it said it was going to "about 150 people". I assumed it was "about" because some people have mulitple children, so it would only send it 1 time. That was not the case. Only 60 people received the email and several people didn't receive it at all.

Are there any developments in this area? We noticed that (much of the time) if a registrant is signed up at the "Guest of" or is hosted by a parent, a duplicate is created. Therefore, if a parent signs up multiple children, they all have a duplicate. However if a registrant is signed up as "themselves" there is not a duplicate? It's confusing but that's what we've noticed. We have so many to go through after VBS and a men's event.

Yes we have 210 duplicates due to VBS registrations just checked today. VBS registration started May 15th. We have been going through them for a month and as you can tell sign ups are faster than fixing the duplicates. (insert unhappy face here)

This is happening to us with our VBS signups. The kids don't have parent email addresses or specific phone numbers on their records, and therefore do not "match up" in the database and it creates a duplicate. We have about 80 duplicates to sift through just from VBS signups, and the number is growing. Would love a solution! I'm now finding that even missing information creates a duplicate...

It happens to adults from misspellings or a different email address infrequently, but the amount it happens with the children is becoming overwhelming!

Hi Anthony,

I think if Date of Birth was a field it could be matched with that would be super helpful for our church. Most of our event registrations are for kids (parents signing them up) and phone numbers and email addresses don't match the children very often unless the parent's contact info is in under the child.

We think a DOB field would be very helpful for forms. Is this something that can be implemented?

For me it's not necessarily the person registering that creates the duplicate (if they're entering their phone number and email, it usually matches them), but it's their guests that create duplicates. If there is any way it could see that when John Brown registers and matches him and he adds June Brown as his guest, if they have an established relationship in BB (spouse, parent/child, etc.), that it would recognize June Brown and not create a duplicate. Not sure if that's possible.

Anthony, What do you mean by other fields? The only matches I can think of right now are first name, last name, phone and email, maybe address. What other fields would help in matching that you might be thinking about?

We would love some thoughts or ideas around some fields that might be useful here. Right now we are matching on last name, first name and contact info. We require this because we need to ensure we have a 100% match before we can go that route. We would never want to match incorrectly as that would be a much worse scenario.

Are there other fields that are being gathered via forms that you feel would give us that same level of confidence?