EmailAddressArchiving

Email Address Archiving

If you import people from other systems (like our Mailchimp and Constant Contact integrations), this tool helps prevent the creation of duplicates by allowing more than two email addresses to be associated with an account.

Rationale

Jake Hypothetical has been connected with the church for a few years. Through that time, he graduated from college, became a member of the church, and now works in the area. He joined the College email list with his University email address, he became a member with his personal email address, and at some point he put his work email address into a form. TouchPoint can only have two email addresses associated with a person. So Jake's three addresses are hard to store.

When we sync the college email list from Mailchimp, this tool gives us a chance of not creating duplicate entries. Or, at least, not creating re-creating duplicates after the first duplicates are merged.

How it Works (conceptually)

This script puts all email addresses associated with a Person record into a JSON array, stored as an extra value. This allows one person record to have more than two email addresses associated with the record.

When the import tools run (at least, our inport tools), not only will the search look for matching records based on the normal email fields, but also this extra value.

This script is intended to be included in the morning batch routine.

Merging

This will also combine and clean up email addresses from record merges, so long as the script is able to run both before and after the merge. That means, after you merge, don't merge that merged profile again.

Immutability

You, as the admin of your church's TouchPoint database, can make these lists functionally immutable. To do this, make EmailAddresses a Standard Extra Value, limited to the Admin role (or the API role, or some other uncommon role).

Caution

This script will take several seconds or a few minutes to run, especially the first few times. During this time, TouchPoint may be unresponsive for all users. Therefore, we strongly encourage running this only as part of the morning batch.

How to Install

Option 1: Install Automatically with a Sync Tool

1. Install our Mailchimp Sync tool or our ConstantContact Sync tool. This tool is installed automatically.

Option 2: Install Manually

1. In the Special Content section, create a new Python Script called EmailAddressArchiving.
2. Paste into that script all of the content from EmailAddressArchiving.py
3. If you don't already have a morning batch script:
   1. Create a new python script called MorningBatch. (Read more here.)
   2. From Administration > Setup > Settings, change the setting RunMorningBatch to True
4. Add model.CallScript('EmailAddressArchiving') to your Morning Batch script.