Matching and the review queue

Matching is how a gift finds the right person. It is the piece of Relae doing the most work and the piece you should have to think about the least.

The problem

The same donor arrives from different channels under different names. Margaret Okonkwo at the box office. M. Okonkwo on the giving portal. OKONKWO, MARGARET from the bank. A human reading those three knows it is one person. A system matching text does not, until it is taught.

Three outcomes

Every incoming gift lands in one of three states.

Confident. Relae is sure who this is, usually because the email address matches exactly or the name is an unambiguous match. The gift attaches to the record and you never see it.

Worth confirming. A likely match with something not quite right. A shortened first name, a changed surname, a typo. These reach the review queue as a single yes or no.

Unsure. No good candidate, or several equally plausible ones. These reach the queue leading with “create a new record”, because a new record is the safer default and a wrong merge is more expensive to unpick than a duplicate.

Why Relae does not force a match

An engine that always produces an answer produces wrong answers silently. Two different donors called J. Smith should stay two records. Organizations, a foundation, a company, a community board, often match no individual at all, and surfacing them for a person to decide is the correct outcome rather than a failure. You will see the uncertainty rather than a false confidence.

The review queue

The queue holds only what needs a human. If your import produced two hundred gifts and eight questions, you answer eight questions.

Each row shows the incoming gift, what Relae thinks, and why. You confirm the match, choose a different record, or create a new one.

It remembers

This is the part that compounds. Every decision you commit is stored, and applied automatically the next time.

Confirm once that “M. Okonkwo” from the giving portal is Margaret Okonkwo, and every future gift from that name attaches on its own. Say once that “Kettle Valley Arts Foundation” is an organization and not a person, and it is never asked again.

The queue gets shorter over time, which is the intended behaviour. A shop six months in is usually clearing a handful of items a week.

You can see everything Relae has learned, search it, and remove a decision that turns out to be wrong.

Duplicates

Matching stops the same person being created twice from incoming gifts. Duplicates that already exist, usually inherited from an old spreadsheet or a CRM, are a separate sweep that proposes pairs it believes are the same person.

You decide on each pair, and a merge can be undone for thirty days.

Relae only proposes what the evidence supports. A shared email address is not treated as proof of a shared identity, because couples, families and small offices routinely share one.

Next

• Reconciling gifts, for the weekly routine.
• The donor record, for what a match produces.