Deleting Old Records

Dariel Dixon

I'm performing some cleanup, and want to figure out if there is any ideas how long you should wait before deleting old records with no gifts and no actions.  These records that I don't think have much value as there has not been any upkeep with and are no longer being considered for solicitation.  I was curious as to what the community thought about this.

JoAnn Strommen

I'm certain there are some users who hold the view of never delete.  I did this type of clean up in prior position. We had added a number of lists of prospects for an earlier capital campaign. As you said, there was no upkeep done for business contacts, still operating, no relationship or address updates. I think they'd been in for at least 5 years. I did some purging. If we wanted them as active prospects in the future they would come in from a new list import. If they are not being considered for solicitation and the other criteria you said, IMO they are just cluttering up the database.  

Phillip Bicknell

Hi Dariel,

Organisations subject to GDPR have that covered by their Privacy Policies, eg:
https://www.league.org.uk/privacy-policy#howlong 

"Where you do not fall into one of these groups (for instance, if you have only ever signed one of our petitions) we will retain your information for a period of 10 years from your last interaction with us, after which time we will erase it from our records."

Christine Cooke

Well -- this discussion has come up so many times I cannot even count.  There is a whole list of reasons you never delete.

and I will leave you with this expert's POV/perspective on why you never delete records.

https://billconnors.com/wp-content/uploads/Raisers-Edge-NXT-Pricing-To-Delete-or-Not-Delete-Constituents.pdf

Dariel Dixon

I've read this many times Christine Cooke bCREPro‍.  I must say I disagree.  The problem that I have with these records is that they are getting in the way of my data cleanup. Many of our databases haven't always been started with great data hygiene, and if you happen to inherit one of these databases, then I don't see why you would be on the side of never deleting ever.  I don't know if it really makes much sense.  I know that sometimes a little pruning is necessary to get your database to where you need to be.  


Many of these records should not have been created in the first place.  Many of them are completely inactionable, without any way to reference them.  

Christine Cooke

I get what your saying Dariel Dixon.  I have been neck deep in trying to clean up old "why is it here" data on a few occasions and it is painful.  And with technology growing and folks that do not necessarily comprehend the breadth of having and maintaining data does contribute to some very messy data situations.  I have spent many hours combing through individual records trying to figure out if I could identify why/how they ended up in RE and what the story was, what info was on the record etc. that could tell the story and confirm they should be there, even for historical purposes.  It's not just about the dollars and actions.  It all depends on what type of organization you are working at records that have no $$ or action activity still need to be kept for other reasons.  I just caution on delete because once it's gone it's gone and that is the historical integrity of your data that will never be the same or tell the whole story. That's all I'm saying.  

Joanne Felci

I am one of the maverick deleters and have gotten some flack for it on community


IMHO - if the record adds NO value why do you have it there. We are talking records with no gifts, contact info, actions, etc. - just a first and last name and were set up 5+ years ago...bye bye

Rachel Cavalier

I think it depends on your privacy policy. For us, we have some records that are just a name - no gifts, no actions, no events, no address details, no way of knowing why they are in there and quite possibly they are a duplicate of someone who already has a proper record. A lot of these are a holdover from a couple of database softwares back (especially with organisation records and our old DB that had to integrate some of the needs of Finance in a weird way) and when I come across one, I check out when it was created, make sure there's nothing hiding in web view that I can't see in DB view and then mostly they get deleted.


Similarly there are records what will just be Mr Surname or Mrs Surname and an address - same thing, and if the record is older than what our privacy policy says about holding onto data - it goes. Whoever they are/were our interest in just keeping their name and address doesn't outweigh theirs to have their data (limited though it is) just hang out on our database.


Certainly for most of these records, none of the colleagues I currently work along side would have been at our organisation when the records were created so definitely no hope of ever figuring out why "Mrs Smith" is in there without an address!

Carlene Johnson

I definitely agree with Bill Connors‍ writing on this topic, but think it is important to note that the article is about deleting as a result of NXT PRICING CHANGES.  He doesn't say that we should never delete "garbage" records as part of our overall database maintenance. So while I agree that a) there are many records in our organizations' systems that may not have gifts or actions but are there for another reason (as Christine Cooke bCREPro‍ pointed out) and b) we should be careful before we pull the trigger to delete those records; I also believe that we owe it to ourselves, our colleagues, our database, and our future replacement(!) to get rid of garbage - assuming it is, in fact, garbage.  


So - deleting junk records that get in the way of our organizations having a useful system is a good thing.  Deleting records because we are worried about pricing of NXT is a bad thing.  

Dariel Dixon‍, I hope this helps.  I've found a ton of organization records that have an out of date business name, out of date address, phone, email and no one has done any upkeep on the contacts at the org.  No one remembers why they were added to the system in the first place, and we can't do anything with the records because they are so out of date.  There are no gifts and no actions.  I suspect that at one point TWENTY TO THIRTY YEARS AGO someone thought it was a good list of suspects/prospects and wanted to send our newsletter to these businesses.  They are useless to us know so I deleted them.  Gleefully!


As Bill said in his article:  "Should you just look at the issue?  Sure, there's nothing wrong with spending a few minutes understanding your database and seeing if a predecessor did dump in a lot of name-and-address-only records that could just be deleted"