Merge duplicate donors

Finding two records for the same person and combining them without losing history.

Who can do this Owner, Admin

When the same person ends up with two donor records — a typo’d phone number, a paper receipt keyed in twice — merging combines them into one without losing either side’s giving history.

Before you start

DonorCARE flags possible duplicates for you: open the donor’s profile and look for the Possible Duplicates panel above the tabs, or review every pair at once on Donors → Duplicates (the page is titled “Possible duplicates”). The Duplicates page lists donors in your organization who share an email or phone number; the Donors → Triage queue is the other place to work through them.
A profile that belongs to a staff member or organization owner (not a donor) can’t be merged this way — demote or remove their membership first.

Review duplicates across your organization

Open Donors → Duplicates. Each row shows the two donors side by side (name, email, phone and number of donations), a Matched on badge (Same email or Same phone), and May be a household where the two could be family members sharing a contact detail.
Select Review and merge to open the same comparison described below, or Different people if the two really are separate. A short note is optional (“For example, a mother and her son who share a phone”); select to confirm. They won’t be suggested again unless they start sharing something new.
Changed your mind? Open Marked as different people at the foot of the page and select Undo next to the pair.

Different people and Undo are shown only to roles that can delete donors.

Steps

Open the donor you want to keep, and find the match. On their profile, the Possible Duplicates panel shows any other record sharing a phone, email, identity number, or name, with a badge showing which field matched. A name-only match needs a closer look before you merge — it’s the weakest signal.
Select Compare & Merge next to the candidate.
Choose which record survives. The survivor keeps its own name, email and phone by default — pick the other record as the survivor if it’s the more complete one. You can also click any individual Name, Email or Phone cell in the comparison table to pull that one value across regardless of which record you chose as survivor.
Review what will move, listed at the bottom of the dialog: donations, active recurring donations, tags, notes, and family members all transfer to the survivor, and so does the donor’s bank-transfer giving reference at your organization (the reference they quote when paying by transfer), with duplicates skipped rather than doubled.
Select Merge into [name]. The merge happens immediately — there’s no further confirmation step.

What merging does

Expect every donation, active recurring donation, tag, note, family member and giving reference on the removed record to move onto the survivor, so the survivor’s giving history and totals become the full combined picture.

Don’t

Expect to undo a merge. Once it runs, the two records are one — there is no unmerge. If the survivor already has a tax profile, the other record’s tax profile is discarded (any blank fields on the survivor are filled in from it first); if only the removed record had one, it moves across intact.

The removed record itself is deleted once nothing else in DonorCARE still points to it; if it’s still linked elsewhere (another organization you don’t share, for instance) it’s simply detached from this organization instead. Either way, it stops appearing in your donor list. Take a moment on the comparison screen before confirming — this is the one step in DonorCARE that can’t be walked back.