Can I use a Formal/Legal First Name and a "Goes By"/Familiar Name in a Member Profile?

Adding Familiar/ Goes By and Formal /Legal first names in Churchteams so that you don't duplicate members who use two different names

You can add Legal First Name as a member attribute (Members > Settings > Member Attributes).   To help keep duplicates from occurring when a person fills out a registration form, the system will search both the First Name and the Legal First Name member attribute fields. (We also added this to the search field in contribution data entry to help avoid duplicates there.)

Often data from other systems have fields for both Familiar/ Goes By and  Formal /Legal first names.  We import  Familiar/Goes By into our First Name fixed attribute field.  Formal/Legal  is imported as a custom attribute.  With the Dashboard release we've added Legal First Name as a reserved custom attribute for importing future data.  If you have a  similar field, review and edit it so that it is labelled Legal First Name.   That way Search can find James even if he's listed in the database as Jim.