We have just released an update to our successful global merge utility The Mergician. We have always had a way of searching for records in The Raiser’s Edge using complex and flexible criteria. IDLookup was one of the first plug-ins that we ever wrote and since it was first developed it has grown to contain some of the most powerful look up criteria around. A year or two ago we created IDLookup Dedupe, making use of IDLookup to search your database for duplicates. Well now we have gone one step further and brought all of this flexible, customization and downright lovely criteria lookup into The Mergician giving everybody the power to choose exactly how they dedupe their data.

There are 20 fields to choose from, many of which you can decide whether or not to search by the whole word or a specific number of characters. You can search using soundex (where names like Johnson and Jonson would be matched), you can search using first name and address line equivalents so that names like Bill match on William and Bvd match on Boulevard. If you are feeling very adventurous you can change the collation so that accented names would match with or without the accents e.g. Édouard would match Edouard.

Not only can you set up one criteria set, but you can set up multiples. You can decide that you want to narrow down the matches made from one to the next or you can decide that you want to select the criteria set with the fewest matches.

The Mergician still supports The Raiser’s Edge own dedupe algorithm so you can continue to create your merge report using that. You can also use our simple email matching tool too or you can use a third party agency to do the matching for you. However using our latest matching engine will give you real flexibility to match based on your own data without having to rely on mysterious algorithms or scoring charts.

Find out more about The Mergician or download the trial version today.