Chapter 1:

Build a Clean Contact List

Organizer View

Every wasted text, phone call, or email is time that could’ve gone toward real conversations. Cleaning your contact list isn’t busywork; it’s one of the fastest ways to increase reach, efficiency, and trust with your base.

A clean list means your team knows exactly who they’re contacting, where they are, and how to reach them, no duplicates, no dead numbers, no ghosts.

You’ll Learn To:

Remove duplicates and normalize contact fields
Validate phone numbers and emails
Fill in missing ZIP or county data automatically
Export a “golden” list ready for texting or canvassing

Why Deduplication is an Important Organizing Skill

When your data is messy, duplicated, or contradictory, it doesn't just create technical issues but also problems with organizing. Messy, incorrect data can cause you to waste the time of your volunteers, annoy members that you may end up texting five times, miscount your base, or even make bad strategic decisions.

When data is duplicated or incorrect:

One supporter looks like three different people
A strong volunteer looks like low engagement
Your universe looks bigger than it actually is
Your outreach looks stronger than it actually is
Your turnout projections are wrong
Your organizers lose faith in the data team

Most importantly, people may feel like the hard work they’re doing isn’t being counted. Whether that’s internally with your organizers or externally with your volunteers. Clean data is not so much a “nice to have” but a need, in order to build respect, trust, and power.

What is Deduplication?

Deduplication is the process of identifying and merging records that represent the same person. For example, someone may have used their middle name when signing up for an event, but another time forgo it. That would end up creating two contact records in your system and possibly split up the records of engagement.

What Deduplication Actually Is

To properly dedupe data, you really have to answer one question: “Are there two records of the same human being?”

While that may sound like an easy task, sometimes it may not be, depending on some of these factors. People may:

Change phone numbers
Use nicknames
Misspell their names
Share phones with family members
Change addresses
Use different emails for different purposes
Get married, divorced, or rename themselves

One thing to remember is that sometimes there is no perfect match, but to make sure there is confidence in the merge there are a couple of factors to consider.

Which fields matter the most?
How much difference is acceptable?

This is why this has to be a living system and evolve as the organization and base grow.

How Deduplication Fits Into the Organizing Workflow

This is an ongoing process that will need to be checked in on multiple times throughout the year. That can be quarterly or monthly, whichever works for your organization. Some key times are:

When data is first ingested
Before major outreach pushes
Before reporting up to leadership
Before sharing data across teams
Before elections