We have contacts that are grant writers in SF that have multiple affiliations with NPO's. The issue is that the contact has created a portal account for each org to submit a grant application using emails associated with each NPO. We are unable to merge the contacts without disabling the portal access. What are other NPO's that have grant programs doing to manage these duplicate records?
I've seen posts that recommend making the duplicated records members of the household, is this the best way to handle this issue without losing the grant writer's history for portal access?
Hi @Karen Hartt
Since each portal account uses a different NPO email, Salesforce won't flag them as duplicates automatically, that's a process problem, not a matching-rule problem, so no dedupe setting fixes it. I have seen this with one of the association I was working with.
Options:
- Ask at the application stage. Add a question to the grant application form: "Are you already a registered user with us?" If yes, capture their existing email/username and route the new application to that existing Contact/portal account instead of creating a new one.
- Match on identity, not just NPO relationship. Before granting portal access, check for an existing Contact by name + personal email or phone, not just the NPO-specific email. If found, add the new NPO affiliation to that existing Contact rather than creating a second one.
- One portal login, multiple affiliations. If your portal license allows it, let one Contact log in once and see/submit applications for every NPO they're affiliated with, instead of a separate login per NPO. This removes the reason to duplicate in the first place.
- If separate logins are unavoidable (portal architecture requires one Contact per login), don't merge instead, link the duplicate Contacts to each other (a custom "Related Person" or NPSP Relationship record) so staff can see they're the same human, and report on them as one person via that link rather than via Contact merge.
