We are establishing a policy for deleting constituent records and we'd like to know the guidelines other organizations are using.
The bulk of the records we are considering deleting are the new students we import each semester who withdraw and do not have a likelyhood of developing a relationship with the university. Another large group contains the records that have not had activity in years, don't have gifts, actions, tributes, etc.
All ideas are welcome!
Cecily
HI Cecily,
You are going to get a lot of "never!"s as the answer.
We are a school and while we don't import current students (we wait until they graduate) we never delete records. And anyone else who is in the database for whatever reason (even if no one can remember why) is kept. We just mark them Inactive if we don't want to include them in anything like mailings or reports. The feeling is you just never know so no deleting records.
laura
Cecily,
I know we are in the minority but we do delete constituents. Our community and database is smaller, most constituents are local and we want to keep database as clean as possible. Prior to converting to RE, we had accumulated a lot of useless records. We do not delete any donor or person with an established relationship with the YMCA.
An example of this case would be a constituent who was added at the request of a volunteer solicitor (perhaps friend, relative...). Even though we ask for bio info from our solicitors sometimes all we get is a name of who they wish to contact. The requested constituent is added to RE and solicitor assignment made so that we know what constituents each solicitor has and so we do not assign same constituent to another solicitor. Occassionally, this requested person does not give and establishes no relationship with our organization. If solicitor does not return as a volunteer most often because solicitor has left area, after 2 years this constituent would be deleted. Their relationship was with the solicitor, no relationship with organization, so to us their record is useless. If they happen to be requested by another solicitor they would just be re-entered into RE.
Another example would be local business with no giving history that goes out of business.
I know this goes against policiies of many RE users, but I've learned that there are many different types of organizations with differing purposes for each prospect in their database. To us, the constituents in the situations above are useless to us so we see no purpose in having them in the database.
We are still working on standards/policies for using "inactive."