Some users will inadvertently create multiple user profiles or accounts for themselves, and become confused when they log in to account #2 and don’t see the tickets they purchased under account #1. In this case, the best thing to do is merge the accounts.

If you click the List Dups button in the user navigation area, you’ll see a list of records that Audience1st suspects might be duplicates, based on some simple rules about similarity. It’s a good idea to “groom” the database periodically by clicking the List Dups button and merging duplicate accounts.

To merge two user profiles, both profiles must be visible in the summary listing. For example, if you suspect a patron named Al Johns has duplicate profiles in the system, use the search field in the user navigation area to search for “Al Johns”, and you’ll see a summary list of all user profiles matching that search. Presumably, two of the matching records will be the two duplicate entries for Al Johns, possibly shown alongside Albert Jones, Alice Johnson, and so on.

To merge two user profiles shown in the summary list:

1. Click the checkbox to the left of each name. (You can only merge two user profiles at a time. If there are more than two duplicate records for one patron, repeat this process for each pair.)
2. If you click “Manual Merge”, you’ll be shown the two sets of contact information side-by-side in two columns; you decide which information to use in the merged record.
3. If you click “Auto Merge”, Audience1st will make these choices automatically by preferring the information belonging to the user profile that was accessed most recently.

All purchases, donations, and other activity from both user profiles will be preserved in the merged account.

Audience1st doesn’t allow creating two accounts with the same email address. After a merge, the patron will only be able to log in to the system using the email address and password that were retained during the merge. (Whichever email address you choose to retain in manual merge, the corresponding password is retained too.) You may need to communicate with the patron to remind them that only this single email address can now be used to log in, although once they log in they can always change their email address or password to something else, as long as no other user has a profile with that same email address.