CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Looking for other's input on best practices for online contributions/memberships/events to reduce duplicate creation but make it easy for people to complete the transaction.  Please comment on what I've written and tell me if you agree or would have different recommendations.

In general we recommend always inserting a profile that requires a login/account creation.  However, in some circumstances, this is not ideal because it may discourage the potential contributor.

If login/account creation is not desired then it depends if the organization is more concerned with creating inadvertent duplicate records or having two or more contacts inadvertently updating the same record.

To eliminate duplicates we recommend setting the strict individual duplicate match equal to email only. We also recommend using profiles that have data attached to the event/contribution/membership and not using any profiles attached to the user record to eliminate an inadvertent user data updates in case multiple people are using the same email. If your organization tends to have multiple people using the same email accounts, then multiple users may update the same account.

To eliminate two or more contacts updating the same record, we recommend setting the strict duplicate match to include other items such as First & Last Name, or even city, state.  Using a strict duplicate match in this manner will increase the possibility of multiple contacts having the same email which will cause issues when the needs to choose the contact information for something like a bulk email.