Adding Familiar/ Goes By and Formal /Legal first names in Churchteams so that you don't duplicate people who use two different names
For Churchteams clients who began their subscription before 2019, you can add the Legal First Name field as a custom people attribute by navigating to People > Settings > People Attributes. Click Add and create the custom people attribute. It must be named "Legal First Name."
Storing a Legal First Name for people who go by another name, ie. James/Jimmy helps prevent duplicates from occurring when a person fills out a registration form or makes an online contribution using their Legal Name rather than the name they go by, which is commonly in the First Name field on a person's record. The system will search both the First Name and the Legal First Name member attribute fields to prevent a duplicate record being created. (We also added this to the search field in contribution data entry to help avoid duplicates during batch entry.)
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.
From the Advanced Search (located on your Churchteams home page), you can search by the Legal First Name, and the results will show anyone with that name in either the First Name or Legal First Name field.
