We are excited to announce a number of improvements to your People Search experience in the Church Community Builder software, which went live to your sites on October 17. These changes include a new Global People Search feature, a Duplicate Detector, a better Create Profile experience, and more!
Global People Search | Duplicate Detector | Inactive Profile Filter |
New Create Profiles | Disabled Form Notification
Global People Search
People Admins and the MA will now have a new 'Search' icon in the header. This will allow you to do a people search from any page in the software! When you click on the icon, a text field will open up, where you can search by:
- Name
- Phone Number
- Email Address
- Address
This new global search feature will be available when you're using the software on a larger device (e.g., tablet, laptop, or desktop). We hope it makes it easier for you to quickly find the people you're looking for and navigate to their profiles.
Duplicate Detector
On the (Beta) People Search page, full write admins and the MA will now see a 'Duplicates' card that indicates how many profiles have at least one potential duplicate in your database.
You can filter the people list by clicking on this new Duplicates card. We also added a new people search filter called Duplicates where you can set up your search manually, and further filter the results with additional criteria.
Merging Profiles
When you click on the number of potential duplicates for one of the profiles, you will be presented with the Merge Profiles modal, where you can select all of the profiles that are true duplicates, merge them together, and decide what pieces of information to keep in the newly merged profile... all without leaving the people search page.
If you find that some of the potential duplicates aren't actually duplicates, all you have to do is click 'ignore' on that name and it will no longer be presented as a duplicate for that profile. But don't worry... we've also added a new filter on the search page where you can see all the 'ignored' duplicate profiles, in case you want to check your work.
Behind The Scenes
We built an algorithm to search your database regularly looking for potential duplicate profiles. This algorithm is looking for things like profile name, email, phone number, and address matches. We also make sure that we don't present two profiles as potential duplicates if they're in the same family (i.e., share the same Family ID). When we find a match, we're storing those profiles as potential duplicates of each other in the database, until you merge them or click 'ignore'. We know the speed of the software is very important to you, so we've also taken great care to make sure these regular duplicate profile checks will not negatively affect the performance of your site.
Flexibility
We've worked hard to make our algorithm really smart so you get legitimate duplicate profile matches and as few false positives as possible. However, we also understand all data is not created equal. With this in mind, we added a setting to the duplicate detector so you can require more contact information to match for a profile to be considered a potential duplicate. To change this setting, just click on the 'ellipsis' icon in the top right corner of the Duplicates card, choose 'Duplicate Settings', and move the slider to show more or fewer results.
You're Not Alone
Because this is the first time we've been able to proactively show you potential duplicates across your whole database, we know that your initial potential duplicate number might be pretty big! In fact, we ran the numbers, and 95% of our churches have somewhere between 4%-14% of their database profiles with at least one potential duplicate.
It may be a daunting task to start working away at those duplicates. If you need some guidance to understand where to start, or some insight into where these duplicates might be coming from, our Support Team would love to help you out! Just submit a support ticket and they'll be in touch!
Inactive Profile Search Criteria
While you're on the new People Search page, you'll also find a new search filter: Profile Status. This filter allows you to quickly filter by whether a profile is active or set as Inactive. Sometimes those inactive profiles can be hard to dig up, so hopefully this search filter helps you uncover them faster!
Improved Create Profile Experience
In People: Reimagined, we released a brand new and improved 'Create Profile' experience to our new search and profile pages. With this update, we have also included this new experience when you are creating a profile from the old People Search page, so now you can enjoy all the benefits of a cleaner, faster, smarter create profile flow from all of your People pages.
Disabled Form Notifications
This change isn't directly related to improving the People Profile experience, but we think it's still beneficial to you. We have created a new email notification to inform Form Managers when their forms have become disabled, so they can quickly solve the problem.
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