How to Set up Raiser’s Edge Individual Constituents Settings

In this article, we’ll guide you through setting up the Individual Constituent Settings for the Raiser’s Edge integration. These settings control how your Individual Constituents are matched in Raiser’s Edge.

When our integration syncs data from Trellis into Raiser's Edge, it goes through a process called Constituent Matching. The Individual Constituent settings allow you to configure how the constituent matching process works, according to your database.

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How to Set Up Constituent Match Criteria

Primary Match Criteria are the initial set of conditions used to determine if an individual who made a purchase on Trellis is already an existing constituent in your database.

Secondary Match Criteria are used as a tie-breaker when multiple constituents match the Primary Match Criteria. These criteria help refine the search, allowing you to prioritize the information to find the correct constituent.

1. From your dashboard sidebar, go to Integrations > Blackbaud
2. Click Settings
3. Navigate to Individual Constituents Settings
4. Select your Primary Match Criteria
   1. For the best results, we strongly recommend you select Last Name and Email Address as your Primary Criteria.
      1. These are required for transactions on Trellis and are most likely to be unique to a donor.
   2. If you anticipate making a number of transactions with dummy email addresses (such as for mail-in raffle tickets), you should select Last Name and Phone Number as your primary criteria.
5. Next select your Secondary Match Criteria
   1. For the best results, we recommend selecting First Name and City or Street Address for Secondary Match Criteria.
   2. In this section, you can also reorder the criteria based on the order of priority that makes sense for your organization
   3. Under Match Type, choose one of the following:
      1. Exact - The spelling must be correct
      2. Close - One character can be incorrect
      3. Flexible - Up to three characters can be incorrect

Individual Constituent Code

When a new constituent is added, select the constituent code to associate with the individual from the drop-down list of your existing codes from Raiser’s Edge. 

1. Search for the appropriate Individual Constituent Code for new constituents
2. Select Set start date as date of creation if you want the creation date to be recorded in Raiser’s Edge

Default Contact Information Type 

When new contact information is provided for an existing constituent, Trellis will not override or delete any current information. Instead, the additional contact details will be added. In this section, you can select titles for the new default information used.

1. Click the drop-down selector to choose the new Information Type you want to use.

When you are all finished, click Save to complete the Individual Constituent Settings. These will now be the default settings whenever you create a new fundraiser.

If you want to customize a specific fundraiser's settings, click here to learn how.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can you set more than one Constituent Code? 

A: Unfortunately no, not at this time.

Q: Our integration seems to have a lot of duplicates, how can we update our constituent match settings to prevent this?

A: We recommend the following match criteria setup for most organizations:

• Primary Criteria: Email Address or Phone Number + Last Name
• Secondary Criteria: First Name + City or Street Address

If you already have these as your match criteria, or made an adjustment due to your database, then there may be another issue causing duplicate records to be created. Please reach out to our Product Engagement Team at support@trellis.org with specific checkouts and examples where duplicates were created incorrectly, so we can investigate further.