When a donor provides their name and email address, the giving system attempts to link the gift to the correct record. Understanding how matching works helps your team explain why a gift did or didn't attach to someone's profile.
How Donor Matching Works
Give Now asks the payer for their first name, last name, email address, and phone number. The payer can choose to provide this information or submit their payment anonymously.
Donors who provide their personal information
The giving system uses the provided first name, last name, and email address to match it to an existing record.
- If those fields don't exactly match, a new record will be created.
- If the fields provided exactly match an existing record, the donation will be added to that donor's profile.
The system errs on the side of caution when matching donors. This means if a donor's profile uses their full given name (ie., Michael Aarons), but they donate using a nickname or a shortened version of the name (ie., Mike Aarons), it will not consider this a match. A new record will be created.
New records can be merged with existing records. See Merge Donor Profiles for help.
Anonymous Donors
Anonymous donations are not matched to a donor record. Instead, they are flagged as Anonymous Member. These gifts cannot be transferred to a donor's record.
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