Case Study

713 Hours Saved in 2 Weeks: How Robin Hood Foundation Cleaned a Decade of Duplicates

Clean data. Confident staff. And a foundation ready for AI. All without leaving Salesforce.

When you're one of the largest foundations in New York City, distributing $150-170 million in grants annually to fight poverty, your data isn't just a database. It's the nervous system of your mission.

Every contact record represents a real person: a donor funding affordable housing, a grantee running job training programs, a program officer coordinating time-sensitive outreach to families in need.

But after more than 10 years in Salesforce and 220,000+ contact and account records, the Robin Hood Foundation had a problem that wouldn't go away on its own: duplicates everywhere.

Manual record creation had quietly introduced thousands of duplicate contacts over the years. Staff were confused. Donor data was scattered. Email validation was manual guesswork. And Salesforce's native tools, even the enhanced package, couldn't scale to the problem.

Then they found Plauti Deduplicate and Plauti Verify, Salesforce-native solutions that live entirely within their existing environment, with no separate apps or fragile external connections. In just two weeks, they cleaned up years of legacy mess, embedded prevention into every entry point, and built a foundation for AI-powered donor intelligence.

Here's how they did it.

Customer Snapshot

Organization: Robin Hood Foundation
Industry: Nonprofit, poverty alleviation
Region: New York City, United States
Mission: Enable economic mobility for New Yorkers experiencing poverty
Annual Impact: $150-170 million in grants
Focus Areas: Housing, education, jobs
Salesforce Tenure: 10+ years
Database Size: 220,000+ contacts and account records
Plauti Products: Deduplicate, Verify
Key Teams: Development (fundraising), program officers, business intelligence

Customer Snapshot

Meet Hao Lyu: Director of Business Intelligence

Hao leads the Business Intelligence team at Robin Hood and manages their entire Salesforce instance. He builds the automations, designs the flows, and ensures that every process, from donor management to grant tracking, runs on clean, trustworthy data.

His philosophy is simple but uncompromising:
"The system is only as good as the data that is in our system. No matter how advanced or how automated you design your system, if the data is not good, it's meaningless."
- Hao Lyu, Director of Business Intelligence, Robin Hood Foundation

For Hao and his team, data quality isn't a one-time cleanup project. It's a system.

The Challenge: A Decade of Duplicates, Invalid Emails, and No Scalable Solution

Over 10+ years, Robin Hood’s Salesforce database had grown to over 220,000 records. That growth was a testament to their impact, but it is also a source of three persistent problems that manual processes couldn’t solve.

Duplicate Records Everywhere

Manual contact creation was the culprit. Staff across teams, development, program officers, and operations, would create new contacts during their daily work. Sometimes they didn’t realize a contact already existed. Sometimes search results didn’t surface the right match. Sometimes it was just faster to create a new record than to dig through old ones.

The results were alarming.

Thousands of duplicate pairs scattered across the database.
Staff confusion: “Which record is the real one?”
Wasted time double-checking, verifying, and manually merging
Data mistrust: Users couldn’t confidently rely on what they saw in Salesforce

And because Robin Hood works with high-profile donors and time-sensitive grantee outreach, they couldn’t just auto-merge everything blindly. Every merge decision mattered.

“ You don’t want to be looking at two records with the same name showing up and try to wonder which one is the right one. ”

Hao Lyu Director of Business Intelligence, Robin Hood Foundation

Email Validation Was Manual Guesswork

Robin Hood’s development team and program officers relied heavily on accurate email and phone data for mission-critical outreach.

Donor receipts and solicitations: high-stakes, high-touch communications
Time-sensitive grantee follow-ups: program officers reaching out to nonprofits they fund
Occasional donor calls: personal relationship management

But there was no built-in way to validate whether an email address was actually deliverable, or a phone number was correct. Staff had to send test emails and wait for bounces, manually verify contact info with external tools, and cross-check records before every major outreach campaign.

It was slow, redundant, and introduced unnecessary risk into high-stakes communication.

“ Having the validation in there with the green mark, knowing that it’s a valid email… that’s very important to the development team. Our program officers reach out to grantees all the time… knowing that it’s the right email, especially when it comes to time-sensitive follow-ups, I think that’s important. ”

Hao Lyu Director of Business Intelligence, Robin Hood Foundation

Why Robin Hood Chose Plauti

When evaluating solutions, Hao and the Robin Hood team compared three options:

Salesforce’s native enhanced duplicate management package
DemandTools, now part of Validity
Plauti’s Deduplicate and Verify solutions

Plauti won. Here’s why.

Salesforce Native Was Non-Negotiable

Robin Hood needed a tool that lived inside Salesforce, no separate logins, no external desktop apps to install, no fragile API connections that could break.

“We’ve been looking for a solution that’s native in Salesforce. We don’t want a separate application. Something that’s native on the platform allows us to configure directly within our environment and be able to tie it to other processes and automations… without having to log into another application.”
- Hao Lyu, Director of Business Intelligence, Robin Hood Foundation

Why this mattered:

No context switching: Staff stay in Salesforce; no adoption friction
Embeddable in Flows: Duplicate prevention happens automatically in existing workflows
Uses existing Salesforce skills: Admins configure Plauti using Flow, layouts, and permissions they already know
No external connection risks: No API limits, sync delays, or downtime from third-party outages
Scalable with Salesforce: As Robin Hood grows, Plauti scales with them; no platform migration needed

Auto-Merge + Manual Control

They needed intelligent automation for obvious duplicates, but also manual review for sensitive, high-profile donor records. Plauti offered both: auto-merge rules for high-confidence matches, plus an intuitive manual merge UI for nuanced decisions.

“The merge feature, manually merging using Plauti, is just way easier because you can open up more than three records at the same time, and you get to pick whichever, and then you can even override the information on the very left-hand side. So it’s just a way more powerful way, an intuitive way of merging records.”
- Hao Lyu, Director of Business Intelligence, Robin Hood Foundation

Unlike Salesforce’s native 3-record limit, Plauti lets you open multiple duplicate records at once, compare them side-by-side, and choose exactly which fields to keep, even overriding default selections on the fly.

Best Value for a Mission-Driven Organization

For nonprofits, every dollar spent on tools is a dollar not spent on the mission. Robin Hood chose Plauti because it delivered the best price-to-capability ratio compared to alternatives, including Salesforce’s native enhanced package and DemandTools.

“ When we were comparing different products, I think Plauti provides the best value proposition, in terms of the things we could get versus the cost of using the tools. That’s especially important for a customer like us, a foundation, because we want to make sure that every dollar that we spend can generate the most value and impact. ”

Hao Lyu Director of Business Intelligence, Robin Hood Foundation

The Solution: How to Prevent Duplicate Donor Records in Salesforce

Phase 1: Legacy Cleanup in Two Weeks

After completing a major contact management overhaul, reducing record types and streamlining their contact structure, Robin Hood ran Plauti Deduplicate to clean up years of accumulated duplicates.

The results

Metric	Result
Duplicate pairs identified	~2,600 pairs
Match confidence	95%+ match score on nearly all pairs
Merged in 2 weeks	54.9% (~1,427 contacts)
Manual review	High-profile donor records review individually

“ We ran the job multiple times, and we were able to identify around 2,600 pairs; almost every one of them is about 95% matching scores… we merged about 54.9%. It took us about two weeks to complete the whole thing. ”

Hao Lyu Director of Business Intelligence, Robin Hood Foundation

Phase 2: Salesforce Flow Duplicate Detection in Real-Time

Cleaning up the past was just the first step. The real breakthrough was stopping duplicates before they happen. Robin Hood embedded Plauti Deduplicate components directly into their custom contact creation Flow.

How it works

User starts to create a new contact via a custom Flow, not the standard “New” button
Before the record is saved, Plauti scans for potential duplicates
If a match is found, the user sees a real-time warning at the top of the screen
They’re shown the potential of duplicates and are directed to the existing record instead of creating a new one

“A lot of the dupes were actually introduced during the manual creation process. We’ve embedded the Plauti components into the flow so that before folks save a record, it will run through Plauti to identify whether there are potential dupes. Instead of creating a new one, they can just be directed to the actual records.”
- Hao Lyu, Director of Business Intelligence, Robin Hood Foundation

Why they use a custom Flow

Robin Hood has so many fields on their contact and accounts objects that the standard Salesforce form is overwhelming. Their custom Flow asks for only the essential information and embeds Plauti’s duplicate check before the save, so duplicates are caught before they pollute the database.

The result? Faster contact creation, fewer errors, and duplicates caught before they enter the system.

Phase 3: Email Validation Built Into Layouts

Robin Hood also added Plauti Verify validation indicators directly to their contact page layouts, so staff see critical data quality information at a glance.

✅ Green checkmark = valid email
❌ Red warning = invalid or risky email
📞 Phone validation status visible
🚨 Duplicate warnings if potential matches exist

This eliminated the need for manual verification, test emails, and redundant follow-up work, especially critical for time-sensitive donor solicitations and grantee outreach.

Results: Confidence, Clarity, and a Foundation for the Future

1. Fast, Measurable, Cleanup

Before Plauti	After Plauti (2 weeks)
~2,600 duplicate contact pairs	54.9% merged (~1,427 contacts)
Staff confusion: “Which is the right record”	Once source of truth per contact
Manual merge: slow, painful, unsustainable	Intuitive UI + auto-merge rules

2. Prevention System That Stops Duplicates Before They Start

Robin Hood didn’t just clean up the past; they built guardrails for the future.

Plauti embedded in custom contact creation Flow
Real-time duplicate warnings before save
Users directed to existing records instead of creating new ones
Duplicate warnings and validation status visible on contact layouts
Planning to extend to API integrations: pushing records from external system into Salesforce

3. Staff Confidence Changed Behavior and Culture

When staff trusts the data they work with, they take ownership of it. Before Plauti, users were frustrated and confused. Now, they have clarity and confidence:

Duplicate warnings guide them to the right record
Validation marks confirm email accuracy
They know they’re looking at one source of truth

“There’s less confusion around looking at the records. It provides more clarity to our staff, knowing that they’re absolutely looking at the right record.”
- Hao Lyu, Director of Business Intelligence, Robin Hood Foundation

When users trust the system, adoption follows naturally. And when users trust the data, they take ownership of data quality, not just the admin team.

“ I think that also encourages data ownership, knowing that the data that they own, they’re responsible for, will be clean because of a wonderful solution that we’ve implemented in the system. ”

Hao Lyu Director of Business Intelligence, Robin Hood Foundation

4. Clean Salesforce Data Before AI Implementation

For Hao and Robin Hood, data quality isn’t the end goal; it’s the foundation for everything else they want to build.

What clean data enables:

AI-powered deduplication: Hao is excited about Plauti’s AI features
Government relations contact tracking: new contact type for lobbying and advocacy work
API integrations with external systems, with duplicate prevention guardrails built in

“Data is the foundation for the success of deploying AI. Clean data as a prerequisite for AI deployment is a critical thing.”
- Hao Lyu, Director of Business Intelligence, Robin Hood Foundation

Robin Hood isn’t just maintaining their database; they’re building the infrastructure for the next decade of innovation.

Looking Ahead: An Ongoing Commitment to Data Quality

For Robin Hood, data quality is not a one-time project; it’s a system, a cadence, and a culture.

Their ongoing strategy

Annual summer cleanup: Run Plauti jobs once a year to catch edge cases
Real-time prevention: Embedded in Flows and layouts, active every day
Expand to new entry points: API integrations, external systems, and new contact types like government relations
AI-powered deduplication

“We do a summer cleanup every year. We have a cadence in terms of running the jobs, making sure that we merge the contacts manually or intelligently with the auto-merge. Ultimately, we want to be able to capture potential dupes in every entry point of contact being created.”

- Hao Lyu, Director of Business Intelligence, Robin Hood Foundation

Robin Hood isn’t just maintaining their database; they’re building a data foundation that powers their mission for the next decade.

Ready to Turn Data Chaos into a Clean, Scalable System?

If your Salesforce database is drowning in duplicates, your staff can’t trust the data they see, or you’re preparing for AI but know your data isn’t ready, you’re not alone.

Robin Hood Foundation turned 10 years of duplicate chaos into a clean, AI-ready data system in just two weeks with Plauti Deduplicate and Plauti Verify.

But here’s what matters most: clean data isn’t just about efficiency or cost savings. It’s about confidence. Confidence that your development team is sending donor receipts to the right email address. Confidence that your program officers are reaching grantees before critical deadlines. Confidence that when you’re distributing $150-170 million in grants to fight poverty, every decision is backed by accurate, trustworthy data.

For Robin Hood, Plauti isn’t just a cleanup tool; it’s the system that ensures every relationship they manage and every dollar they spend is powered by data they can trust.

If you’re ready to stop firefighting duplicates and start building a data system that scales with your mission, let’s talk.