All about Pool Cleanup 🪄

If you maintain a panel of participants in Ethnio Pool, we offer a suite of data normalization tools to help you cleanup attributes and participants over time that might be either duplicate or malformed. The Pool Cleanup feature helps identify duplicates, merge records, and even automate ongoing cleanup—so your team can focus on research and let Ethnio handle the data hygiene.

The main components of Pool Cleanup are:

1. New button from Pool > Home
2. Recurring pool cleanup in Automations or Pool > Duplicates
3. New system tag for Duplicate after you run a Cleanup

Start cleaning your Pool 🧹

▶️ Start a Pool Cleanup

From Pool > Home, you’ll see a new button called Pool Cleanup. This is where you can run a scan to detect duplicates in your Pool.

🔍 Scan for duplicates

You can choose to scan for either:

• Duplicate Participants – multiple records that may belong to the same person.
• Duplicate Attributes – repeated values across columns like name, email, phone number, or DOB.

Pool Cleanup uses many signals to identify potential duplicates, from straightforward attributes like name or phone number to more advanced methods such as device fingerprinting.

🤝 Review and merge

After a scan, Pool Cleanup will display groups of potential duplicates. You can:

• Merge all duplicates at once.
• Or review one group at a time before merging.

This ensures you stay in control of participant data.

♻️ Automate recurring cleanup

Tired of running cleanup manually? You can now set up recurring cleanup:

• Weekly or Monthly scans.
• Duplicates will be automatically detected and queued for review.

This keeps your Pool tidy on an ongoing basis, but we won't ever bulk merge without your approval. That would be way too aggressive.

👥 The new duplicates queue

All potential duplicates are saved in a new Duplicates queue under Pool > Home > Duplicates. From here you can:

• See pending review items.
• Check cleanup history.
• Track which duplicates were scanned or merged by your team.

What do team members and collaborators see?

Since only account owner or admins can see Pool Cleanup, team members and collaborators do not see the Pool Cleanup button, the duplicates queue, or the automation. If an owner or admin runs a Pool Cleanup, and duplicate participants are flagged with the system tag for Duplicate, then team members or collaborators who have limited access to Pool will see the duplicate system tag: