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Matt Brennan
Matt Brennan | Vice President, Engineering, Civis Analytics

Today’s modern fundraising, outreach, and advocacy programs require reaching your target audience across many different platforms. You have to meet them where they are, and they are all over the place. They can be on the internet, answering a door knock, or walking into your event. Organizations collect data on these individuals in each location, but this creates disparate data sets containing the same individuals. You want to tailor your email campaign to make asks based on events someone has attended, and text based on their donation history. You need a Golden identity list, with a 360 degree view of your audience and members. Civis Platform steps up to this challenge with its Identity Resolution IDR offering, a comprehensive solution to unify and deduplicate person level data across multiple sources. Let’s delve into what Civis IDR is all about and why it matters.

Why Civis IDR Matters

Civis IDR holds significant importance for nonprofit organizations, serving as a linchpin in their efforts to effectively fulfill their missions. By consolidating and deduplicating person level data across multiple sources, IDR enables nonprofits to gain a comprehensive understanding of their constituents, donors, and beneficiaries. This unified view not only enhances operational efficiency but also enables more targeted and personalized outreach, ultimately fostering stronger relationships and deeper engagement with stakeholders. Moreover, the accuracy and reliability of IDR empower nonprofits to make data-driven decisions, optimize resource allocation, and measure the impact of their programs with greater precision. In a sector where every dollar and every interaction counts, the ability to harness the power of identity resolution can be transformative, enabling non-profits to maximize their impact and drive positive change in their communities. Several obstacles stand in the way of this:

  • Data Fragmentation: Data may reside in various tables across different databases.
  • Duplication: Duplicate records can exist within and across data sources.
  • Data Accuracy: The quality and accuracy of data may vary by its source.
  • Data Currency: People change, and data becomes outdated over time.
  • Multiple Points of Contact: Individuals may have different contact information across databases.

Product Philosophy

Civis IDR embodies key principles to ensure its effectiveness:

  • Accuracy & Quality: Sophisticated AI algorithm, tailored specifically to matching data about people…. Continual improvements based on customer feedback and evolving use cases.
  • Trust & Transparency: No one knows your data better than you do. Civis IDR makes sure you know the algorithm’s confidence in a match, so you can configure the threshold for your use case.
  • Speed & Scalability: Engineered specifically to handle large-scale datasets efficiently.
  • Usefulness: Customizable to fit seamlessly into existing business processes.

The Civis IDR Process

Civis IDR tackles the challenges of managing and making sense of personal level data head-on. It takes one or more data sources about people and identifies matches among the person records, thereby determining which records correspond to the same individuals. The Civis IDR product follows a multi-step process providing critical artifacts to data teams enabling a high level of confidence in how they operate:

  1. Loading and Preprocessing Input Data: Data is standardized and preprocessed into a suitable format.
  2. Finding Candidate Matches: Basic shared features are used to identify potential matches.
  3. Scoring and Filtering: Detailed features are employed to provide match scores.
  4. Identifying Matching Records: Groups of strongly matching records are identified using graph clustering.
  5. Outputting Results: Cluster Table and Golden Table are produced, providing a unified view of individuals.
  • Cluster Table: Provides a unique “resolved ID” identifier for each record, grouping together records that represent the same individual.
  • Golden Table: Contains the best information about each individual, selected based on the source records linked together by the IDR system.

Recent IDR Enhancements

The impact of IDR has been apparent to those that use it for years, but it has never been easier to make IDR a part of your ETL processes. From having an updated user experience that places IDR in the center of your Civis Platform Workflows to expanded API functionality, IDR now has what you need to make it an integral part of your data processes. This new update includes:

  • Ability to add IDR pipelines directly to new or existing workflows, or run on any schedule
  • Tighter access controls to manage multiple permission on multiple pipelines for your organization, including ownership transfer
  • API endpoints to create, edit and run IDR pipelines from other applications
  • Full support for organizing in Projects and including in your Favorites
  • Cloning pipelines for iterative development

What’s next?

Civis Platform has a big roadmap for 2024 to help our organizations on their AI journey. We can’t wait to see how you put IDR to use to maximize your team’s impact.

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Get Started Today

If you’re excited about sharing more of the data that is driving your work with your stakeholders, we invite you to reach out to our team of experts. Let us guide you through the process, answer any questions you may have, and help you create and share your services.

Let’s Get to Work