Moving donor CRMs? Clean the contact list first, so the same email doesn’t arrive twice.

Why a donor contact list has repeats

• Several sources: the old donor CRM, your email tool and event or volunteer spreadsheets each hold their own copy of the same email.
• Small differences hide repeats: the same address typed with capitals, or with a stray space at the start or end.
• Cleaning after the move is harder: once the repeats are in the new system, someone has to merge them there, one pair at a time.

Clean before the move, not after

People who have done a donor CRM move say the same thing in public nonprofit forums: clean the data before it goes into the new system, because the mess comes with it. Little Green Light’s own migration guide puts the data preparation step at about 45% of the project’s time and energy (Little Green Light: Prepare for migration).

Your new CRM may also check for duplicates when you bring a file in. Bloomerang’s help article says it looks at first and last name together with an email address, a street address or the last seven digits of a phone number (Bloomerang: Imports 101). Little Green Light says “there’s no silver bullet for eliminating duplicates” (Little Green Light: Checking for and managing duplicates). Merging the same-email rows in your file first means fewer pairs to sort out later, and the change log shows what was merged.

Contacts only: what to send and what we leave alone

Send one CSV of contacts (one row per person record). Do not send gift, pledge or donation rows: a gift file has one row per gift, and merging rows by email would keep the first gift’s amount and only list the others in the change log.

• Households are not linked. Rows are merged only when they share the same email.
• Joint names such as “Micah & Liz Weaver” stay exactly as you sent them. We don’t split them into two people.
• Columns are not matched to your new CRM’s fields. Your columns come back with the same headers, and you match them in the new CRM.
• Addresses are not checked.

Notes you can ignore on a donor list

Our cleaner was built for business contact lists. On a donor list most people use a personal address (Gmail and similar) and have no company, so the QA notes will say “personal email” and “missing company” on most rows and mark those rows for review. That is expected for donors and you can ignore those two notes. The notes that matter are invalid or missing emails and possible duplicates.

Who you can email

A cleaned file is not permission to email anyone. Keep any opt-in or communication-preference column in the file and tell us its name: when merged rows disagree in that column, the kept row is marked for review with both values in qa_notes. We never pick one silently.

What you get back

• One row per email: rows with the same email, ignoring capitals and spaces at the start or end, merged into one; every merge listed in the change log with its row numbers
• Where merged rows differ, the first row’s value is kept and the other value is listed in the change log; a blank cell in the kept row is filled from the duplicate, and that is logged too
• Possible duplicates noted, never merged: rows with the same full name and company but a different email get a “possible duplicate” note in qa_notes and are marked for review; if your file has no company column, on request the same is done for the same first and last name
• Invalid or missing emails marked for review, with the reason in qa_notes
• Your other columns (donor ID, tags and so on) kept at the end, values unchanged apart from extra spaces

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