Shared email addresses

Steve Duncan

• June 16, 2022 12:59

I'm trying to find the best practice for households that share an email address.  Our donor base tends to have a lot of elderly couples so it's not unusual.

 

  For example a couple would use ronandbarb@123.com.  Sometimes Ron may make a donation so Keela would have a record of him.  Sometimes Barb would make a donation so there would be a separate record for her.  When I select “Find and Merge Duplicates” in the contact section I get the option to merge the records.  So my questions:

• Is it a good practice to have two people on the same record?  Ie Ron and Barb Duncan share the same Keela record?
• Or is it better to have a record for Ron and a Record for Barb.  I think that would mean they receive two copies of things like newsletters.  We could associate them with a household but I’m unsure of the benefit of that.
• Or do we separate them into two records and then delete the email address from one of them so they don’t get redundant communications.  Since we don’t send direct mail to our donors, this could work

I’m not exactly sure what the best practice is, so before we do a data clean up, I’d like to know the best approach.

 

Thanks,

Steve

0

• Official comment

  

  Travis Kuhne

  • June 16, 2022 18:36
  • Edited

  Please also see this Knowledge Base Article on Coupling Contacts

   

  If donors share an email address but are donating separately (still using that same address & inputting it on the form), then their payments/interactions/Form Submissions would all be attributed to the same Keela Contact (with that address). This is because Keela will recognize the email address as coming from the same Keela Contact, regardless of if two people put different names down on their donations (Ron vs. Barb's names can be different, but so long as the email is the same - the same Contact will be associated with the interaction + no new Contact will be created).
   
  To answer your questions:

  • Is it a good practice to have two people on the same record?  Ie Ron and Barb Duncan share the same Keela record?
    • Typically we recommend that individuals have their own Keela Contact (it helps with Smart Code personalization, cleaner/singular receipting, etc.) - however I should note that many Keela Users have two people on the same record. It is a common practice. So long as these individuals are always sharing the same email, you can treat them together as a single Keela Contact.
  • Or is it better to have a record for Ron and a Record for Barb.  I think that would mean they receive two copies of things like newsletters.  We could associate them with a household but I’m unsure of the benefit of that.
    • I would not recommend having two Keela Contacts with the same email address for exactly the reason you described (two copies of any emails would be sent to ronandbarb@xplornet.com). Keela Contacts are all supposed to have their own distinct email address from one-another to avoid this situation.
  • Or do we separate them into two records and then delete the email address from one of them so they don’t get redundant communications.  Since we don’t send direct mail to our donors, this could work
    • Yes precisely, this would be the solution for if you wanted to capture them separately within your Keela Account. You could associate them together as a Household as well (the benefit to this to you would be the ability to view all Transactions/Interactions/etc. in one place by clicking the Household, and it also can help with filtering later on). However, if you aren't doing any outreach/interactions with them individually - the benefit to using Households will be minimal. 

  For your situation, it seems like having two people on one Keela Contact (using the same email) would work for your purposes.
   

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