How the Raiser's Edge Integration Matches Constituents

With our Raiser's Edge integration, purchases on Trellis automatically sync into your Raiser’s Edge account. This streamlines your data management and helps you maintain accurate records. 

Overview of the Integration

When someone makes a purchase on your fundraiser, Trellis:

1. Matches or Creates a Constituent: Checks your Raiser’s Edge account to match the purchaser to an existing constituent using your configured match criteria. If no match is found, a new constituent is created.
2. Syncs Gifts: Adds the gift to the matched or newly created constituent based on your gift sync settings.
3. Syncs Event Participants: If you use Events in Raiser’s Edge, attendees are synced as participants.

Read on to learn more about each step.

Matching Individual Constituents

Trellis uses a two-step process to match purchasers to individual constituents:

• Primary Criteria: Required for the initial search and must exactly match an existing record (e.g., email address or phone number). If a single match is found, the integration proceeds to sync the gift.
• Secondary Criteria: Used as tie-breakers if multiple matches are found. These criteria can account for small variations (e.g., "exact," "close," or "flexible").

If no matches are found or multiple potential matches remain after evaluating all criteria, Trellis will create a new constituent.

Matching Organization Constituents

If a purchase is made on behalf of a company or organization:

• Primary Criteria: Organization Name is required but does not need to exactly match. Flexible matching accounts for common variations (e.g., "Trellis Organization" = "Trellis").
• Secondary Criteria: Additional criteria refine the search if needed.

If no match is found, Trellis creates a new organization constituent with the organization name and mailing address provided during checkout.

Preventing Match Errors

To ensure gifts are not added to an incorrect constituent, the constituent match system prioritizes false negative matches (failing to match an existing constituent) over false positives (incorrectly linking to an existing constituent).

• False Positive: Occurs when match criteria are too broad, leading to the system to match to the wrong constituent.
• False Negative: Occurs when system cannot find a match when there is one existing. This happens because match criteria are too narrow or not enough data is available on the checkout or constituent to make a match.This can be corrected later using Raiser’s Edge’s de-duplication tools.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: The integration keeps creating duplicates when it should be finding matches. Why is it doing that?

You might want to check your match criteria to ensure they are configured to allow the system to find matches. If your primary criteria are too narrow, the system will not find any match on its initial search, which means it won't attempt to use secondary criteria. 

Our data shows that having Last Name and Email Address as primary criteria results in the best success rate for finding matches.

Q: We're running a raffle where donors make purchases over the phone or by mail and don't give us their email address. What should we use as primary match criteria?

In this case, we recommend you use Last Name and Phone Number as primary criteria, as your database will be best set up to match on Phone Number.

Q: The integration synced the gift to the wrong constituent. What happened?

There are a number of possibilities as to why it matched to the wrong constituent:

• Your search criteria are too wide, so a false positive match was made. This usually happens when you do not include email address or phone number as a primary criteria.
• The "wrong" constituent happens to have the same information as the purchaser, according to the match criteria.

Q: What data is added to constituents and can I control what is added?

Our integration never deletes or overwrites data, it only ever adds data if it does not already exist. There is no way to configure whether data is added to the constituent.

• For Individuals: All contact information on the checkout (Name, email, phone number, and mailing address)
• For Organizations: Organization name and mailing address syncs, but the purchaser's name, email, and phone number does not. Instead, the individual purchaser is soft credited on the gift, and a relationship is added between the individual and the organization.

Q: How are mailing addresses matched and saved? 

Our integration will standardize common words in addresses to Canada Post and USPS standards before we match and sync the address.