Let’s say Joe Smith goes to your church. Everyone knows him as “Joe”, and they call him “Joe.” He even introduces himself as “Joe.” But technically his name is Joseph, and his checks say “Joseph Smith” on them.
The correct way to handle Joe’s profile in Planning Center is for the first name field to be “Joe” and his Given Name to be “Joseph.”
Until now, if Joe gave online and used his legal name, “Joseph Smith”, Planning Center would think we’d never seen the guy before and create a new profile for him. But not any more!
We just released an improvement to the profile matching algorithm in all of our Church Center products (Giving, Registrations, Groups, and Forms), so that if Joe fills out a form as “Joseph” while using the same last name and email address as are on his profile, we’ll check the first name from the form submission against not only the first name on the profile, but the given name or nickname as well.
This should help prevent some unnecessary duplicate profiles from being created on a regular basis.