One thing, one place

‘Good data management, again, Julie? We get it!’, I can hear you, you know, and yes I’m always banging on about paying attention to the small and seemingly trivial things – well, today’s no different. I’m sticking with that theme and talking about one of the very basics of…

…good data management – and specifically…

…one thing, one place.

That’s it. That’s the rule.

But in practice? Not so easy.

Here are the usual suspects aka the main ways we end up with the same data duplicated across multiple records in a CRM:

1. Event sign-ups
   One person signs up the whole team of four and adds their email, phone, and postal address to everyone’s record. Handy in the moment, messy forever.
2. Couples and families
   One shared email address for two (or more) people. You know the ones: TheJoneses@email.com.
3. Employees and organisations / members and groups
   The organisation has the contact details of its people, and the people have the contact details of the organisation. Now everyone’s everything, everywhere, all at once.

It might feel harmless, even helpful, to duplicate these contact details. But here are a few reasons why it’s…

…not good data management!

In CRMs that integrate with tools like Mailchimp, if someone unsubscribes, the CRM doesn’t know which of the multiple records with the same email address to apply that unsubscribe to.

• That’s how you accidentally email someone who opted out, or, another horror, report someone as subscribed when they’re not – unsubscribes get messy.
• If you’ve added the same email address to both a person and a company or group record, which one holds the valid consent? Can a business even give consent? And can it give consent on behalf of an employee? (Spoiler: that’s a legal grey area you probably don’t want to test.) – consent becomes murky.
• If the same email address is on two records and they show different consent settings, which one wins? Are you looking at a genuine opt-out, or did someone mark it that way to control what gets sent from which record? Conflicting consent = confusion

I’ll be honest: I’m a bit of a coward when it comes to regulations and authority. It’s not my strong suit, but it does make me cautious. And cautious is exactly what you want to be when it comes to things like consent, preferences, and data protection.

It might feel like the right thing to do, copying an email address to every record it touches, but to me, that just opens the door to uncomfortable scenarios I’d rather avoid.

So remember:

‘One thing, one place’.
Your CRM (and your legal team) will thank you.

PS: I judge people who share an email. I can’t help it. Sharing an email address like the Joneses above is like deciding to share a toothbrush, sure, it might technically work, but seriously, who does that?