Merging combines two or more contact records for the same person into one surviving record. Rhythm moves memberships, registrations, and other related records from the merged-away contacts to the surviving contact, then deletes the merged-away records. You cannot undo a merge after it runs, and support cannot reverse it, so review your choices carefully before you confirm.
Before You Begin
Prerequisites
- You need the contact merge permission. Staff with the power-user or administrator role have it by default. Without this permission, the merge menu item and related links are disabled.
- Decide which contact should survive before you start. The master is always the contact you start from, and the wizard does not let you choose a different master later.
You can merge contacts only with other contacts. A contact and an organization are different record types in Rhythm, so you cannot merge one into the other, even when duplicate review or search shows similar results. To merge two organization records, see Merge Duplicate Organizations instead.
Starting a Merge
You can start a merge in two ways, depending on whether Rhythm has already found a likely duplicate for the contact:
- If a contact has one or more suspected duplicates, a warning appears at the top of the contact record. Follow the link in that warning, or open Contact Options and select Merge Duplicate Contacts, to open the Review & Merge Duplicate Contacts dialog with the suspected matches already listed.
- If Rhythm has not found a likely duplicate, open Contact Options › Merge Duplicate Contacts. Rhythm tells you no duplicates were found, but you can still merge contacts by hand:
- Use the contact picker to find the other contact record you want to merge.
- Select Add to Merge. The contact appears in a table below the picker.
- Repeat this for any additional contacts, then continue to the merge wizard.
Rhythm checks your list as you build it by hand. If you try to add the contact you started from, Rhythm shows "You cannot merge a contact onto itself." If you try to add the same contact twice, Rhythm shows "You have already specified this merge contact; you can only specify a contact once."
Resolving Conflicts
No matter how you start, the merge wizard opens on Resolve Conflicts. This step shows a grid with one row for each field where the contacts have different values, and one column for each contact. The master's column is headed MASTER RECORD. When every contact already has the same value for a field, Rhythm does not show that field because there is nothing to choose.
- For each row, choose the contact value the merged record should keep. Each row starts with a default selection: the first contact, starting with the master, that has a value for that field. Make sure every row has a selection before you continue, even if a row looks unusual or a field does not display the way you expect.
- Select Preview Results.
Because the default starts with the master, Rhythm keeps the master's values, including its email address and login, unless you choose another contact's value row by row. After the merge, only the retained email address works for logging in. The merged-away contact's old email does not work, even if you kept other details from that contact.
Result
The wizard moves to Preview Merge, where you can see the record exactly as it will look after the merge, with your choices applied.
Warning
This is your one chance to choose which contact's information wins for each disagreement, such as a maiden name, an old address, or a changed phone number. Review each row instead of accepting every default, especially when you know which record is more current.
Completing the Merge
From Preview Merge, review the combined record. Select Merge Contacts to proceed, Go Back to return to the conflicts step, or Cancel to stop and return to the master's page without merging anything.
Result
After the merge finishes, you see a success message and land on the master's record page. The message notes that related records, such as memberships and event registrations, may take a minute or two to fully catch up, even though the merge itself has completed.
What a Merge Does
- Records in other areas of Rhythm that pointed to the merged-away contacts are moved to the master instead.
- The merged-away contacts are deleted. Rhythm does not keep their old contact IDs anywhere you can look them up afterward, so once a merge finishes, you cannot use a merged-away contact's former ID to find leftover details from it.
- The merge cannot be undone. Rhythm does not have a restore option, and support cannot reverse a completed merge, including a point-in-time restore of relationship or team-member data. If you are not sure the merge is right, do not confirm it yet. If a merge is confirmed in error, the practical path is to recreate what you need by hand: a new contact and, if you have them, the original details from your own records, audit history, or another environment.
- You can confirm whether a merge happened by opening the record's audit log and looking for a merge event there.
If you merge a guest-created contact into another contact, the surviving record does not keep the guest-registration banner that previously could appear after this kind of merge; that display issue was fixed.
Merging duplicate contacts does more than clean up your contact list. Registrations, memberships, and other activity that were split across duplicate records because of inconsistent matching come back together under one identity after the duplicates are merged. This also helps avoid rate or pricing mismatches tied to whichever record was inactive or disconnected. A contact merge does not fix a registration or other transaction that is failing because of a separate organization lookup or affiliation problem. If that is the cause, resolve the organization issue instead.
There is no built-in report or query that lists past merges. To review a merge afterward, open the record's own audit log.
If the Merge Fails
If something goes wrong, such as a record no longer existing or the merge not completing, you see a message explaining the failure. When the merge stops this way, the contact records involved do not change. If the failure happens partway through moving records from other areas of Rhythm, some of those records may already point to the master before the failure occurs, and this screen does not show which ones. If you suspect a partial merge, contact support instead of trying the merge again right away.
- Merging many duplicates into one master at the same time fails. Merge only one or two duplicates into the master at a time instead of adding every duplicate to one merge. Running several smaller merges in sequence has succeeded where one large merge did not.
- A contact you added to the merge no longer exists. Every contact in the merge, including the master and duplicates, must still exist when the merge runs. If one was deleted after you added it, you see an error during conflict review, and that contact also will not appear if you search for it separately.
- The merge fails while reconciling a custom field where the two contacts disagree, most often a single-choice custom field. Check whether the contacts have different values in the same custom field, align them, and try the merge again.
- Preview Results fails with an error naming a custom field, when one of the contacts has communication preference data tied to a communication type that no longer exists. This is a known cause of that kind of error. A rendering error on the communication preferences field itself does not have the same effect and does not necessarily stop the merge from completing, as long as you still make the required field selections.
- The merge reports "Unable to merge contact: unknown" when one of the contacts has donor gift records. This has left records partially merged and removed the duplicate from search results without completing normally. Treat this as a partial merge: contact support with the contacts involved rather than retrying immediately.
- You see an error, or a message that no duplicates were found, but the contacts seem to have merged anyway. Check the contact before assuming the merge did not run. Support has confirmed cases where the merge completed correctly despite a misleading message, including the merged-away contact continuing to appear briefly in universal search afterward.
- Merge Duplicate Contacts opens with no information, even though you can see what looks like a duplicate elsewhere, such as in contact search, with no duplicate warning on the contact's own page. Treat this as a product issue and contact support rather than assuming there is nothing to merge.
- Repeated Merge Duplicate or Review & Resolve Merge Conflicts windows appear after you start a second merge shortly after finishing one. Reload the page and reopen Merge Duplicate Contacts from the contact record if this happens.
- An email address seems "taken" by a contact you cannot find or open, so you cannot create a normal contact with it. Creating a new contact with that email and then merging it into the incomplete or hidden duplicate has cleared the problem in at least one case. After that, the person appeared normally and the duplicate email results went away.
Recovering from an Incorrect Merge
Because a merge cannot be undone, recovering from one you did not mean to run means rebuilding what changed, not reversing it:
- Create a new contact for the person you need to separate back out.
- Move their event registrations, orders, invoices, and other financial or transactional records to that new contact, record by record.
- If you need history to line up with the original timeline, recreate each transaction, such as a membership application, and adjust its date to match, rather than expecting Rhythm to backdate anything automatically.
This rebuilds the records. It does not restore anything from the merged-away contact that was not otherwise kept.
Related Reading
Merging organizations follows a similar process, but without a preview step; see Merge Duplicate Organizations. Before merging, marking a contact's status as Duplicate is a useful way to flag it for merging later; see Change a Contact's Status or Delete a Contact. For what a merge moves application by application, see What a Contact Merge Moves.