Prospective Donors in Raiser's Edge?

Hannah Shaffer

Because there is a cost associated with the number of constituents added into Raiser's Edge, does anyone have tips/best practices on how they have decided who/who not to include when it comes to prospective (not active) donors? I.e., do you have a number limit for these? A trigger to clear them out (i.e., if they haven't given within X amount of time of being added)? 


Any feedback is appreciated! 

Crystal Bruce

Discussion moved to Raiser's Edge Community. Thanks!

Dariel Dixon

Depends on your organization.  For instance, many educational organizations use their database to determine the number of alumni of record.  For constituents who have no defined relationship with your organization, I'd look into the last action or any activity on the record.  I'd also ask my gift officers before any purge to make sure they don't have something in the works for those constituents.


I don't know if I would plan for this until you are on the verge of crossing over the threshold.

Tom Klimchak

I agree with Dariel Dixon‍ that it largely depends upon your organization and how it operates.  We're a private university with over 200,000 constituent records and for us worrying about purging old constituent records is pretty low on the priority list simply because there are so many other regular data maintenance tasks that need to be done on the active records.


More to your point, we never, ever purge donors, no matter how small or how old the gift (our giving history only goes back to about 1982).  Having those donors in there is actually kind of helpful when it comes to running general reports on past history and getting a glimpse of what the organization looked like decades ago.  Is it all super-accurate?  Nope... But it has proven to be very helpful a few times in the past.  


However... you got me thinking... A quick query identifies that we *may* have about 32,000 records with no giving history, no relationships and no real past actions to speak of.  There is a chance that some of those records could be safely purged... but again the manpower and time investment would probably negate any savings we would reap from having a smaller constituent base.


Database space is relatively "cheap" these days compared to the past and it's generally better to have too much information than too little.  Instead of purging anyone I might mark them as inactive or even give them some sort of a constituent code or attribute that marks them as "no longer used"... but if you took the time to gather and enter the information on the person it seems almost a shame to just delete any old constituent records.