Donor data disposal - deleting donor data

Chris Vaz
Chris Vaz
Fifth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions
Hello Community!


Do you have a donor data disposal plan for your organization? In other words, do you ever delete donor's data from Raiser's Edge?

If you do, what is your criteria? 5 years with no activity? 10 years?

If you don't delete any data, do you still keep all donor's personal information in their profile such as address, email, phone numbers?

Please let me know.

Your input is much appreciated =)

Thank you!


Chris


Comments

  • Dariel Dixon
    Dariel Dixon Community All-Star
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management
    I don't believe in deleting donor records, but the question that comes up is why would you feel like this is something that needs to be done? Like Lauren Fardella‍ mentioned, making those records inactive may take them out of rotation for reports or mailings, but there really isn't a reason to delete them.


    Even more importantly, why would you purge data from these records? There is still an opportunity for a donor who you haven't heard from to still respond with a gift, and purging the data will make it difficult to determine if the gift is from the same donor or if it is a new donor. There really shouldn't be a reason to be deleting donor data that I can think of. Granted, many of these old records may be problematic in regards to data entry structures and formats, but deleting them isn't the answer.
  • Candace Chesler
    Candace Chesler
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    We have the tribute module - earlier this year I did a review of our tribute gifts and found 260 donors who had given one tribute gift ten or more years ago and had never given again. For over 50 of these donors, their record was marked as Do Not Contact - and many had no mailing address - just a name.

    In those instances, I created new gift records on our constituent named "Cash" - added a gift note to explain the nature of the original gifts - and I deleted the original 260 constituents. We do not see any reason to hang on to a record for someone who is never going to donate to us again.

    So while we do not have a disposal plan - we do intend to review tribute gifts every few years to cull out the people we believe we will not hear from again.
  • Dariel Dixon
    Dariel Dixon Community All-Star
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management
    Candace Chesler:

    We have the tribute module - earlier this year I did a review of our tribute gifts and found 260 donors who had given one tribute gift ten or more years ago and had never given again. For over 50 of these donors, their record was marked as Do Not Contact - and many had no mailing address - just a name.

    In those instances, I created new gift records on our constituent named "Cash" - added a gift note to explain the nature of the original gifts - and I deleted the original 260 constituents. We do not see any reason to hang on to a record for someone who is never going to donate to us again.

    So while we do not have a disposal plan - we do intend to review tribute gifts every few years to cull out the people we believe we will not hear from again.
    It sounds like these constituents should have never had a record to begin with. If sounds like these records probably didn't have enough information to create a complete record, without a mailing address and just a name. I don't understand the need for these records to be deleted. It may seem like a good idea to delete tribute donors, but what good was does this do? By deleting these donors, you remove the ability to do any type of outreach to these people. I'm about as delete-friendly as they come, but I just don't see the purpose here.
  • Rose Dixon
    Rose Dixon
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant
    Dariel, with the Tribute module, you need to create a record for the person being honored/memorialized. I hate it, but the system we had prior was a mess also - tributes were not consistently named in a gift attribute so you'd. need to know all the variations of an honoree or decedent's name. Someone would say "this is in honor of Rose Dixon" or "Rosie Dixon" or Rosemarie Dixon" and w/o any info tying these 3 names together, trying to run a report of all those who donated IHO/IMO was painful. Of course now we possibly get separate records in RE for the same names, but now we would run those names to see how much was given IHO/IMO that person, rather than running a gift query of all gifts with any possible combo of the name.


    I do like to remove any records where it's obvious a spouse is giving every time IMO their spouse since there really is no collection of money that needs to be report to the surviving spouse/child/etc. In those cases, I put the tribute name as a gift attribute and delete the tribute record.
  • Dariel Dixon
    Dariel Dixon Community All-Star
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management
    Rose Dixon:

    Dariel, with the Tribute module, you need to create a record for the person being honored/memorialized. I hate it, but the system we had prior was a mess also - tributes were not consistently named in a gift attribute so you'd. need to know all the variations of an honoree or decedent's name. Someone would say "this is in honor of Rose Dixon" or "Rosie Dixon" or Rosemarie Dixon" and w/o any info tying these 3 names together, trying to run a report of all those who donated IHO/IMO was painful. Of course now we possibly get separate records in RE for the same names, but now we would run those names to see how much was given IHO/IMO that person, rather than running a gift query of all gifts with any possible combo of the name.


    I do like to remove any records where it's obvious a spouse is giving every time IMO their spouse since there really is no collection of money that needs to be report to the surviving spouse/child/etc. In those cases, I put the tribute name as a gift attribute and delete the tribute record.

    That makes sense Rose Dixon‍. Deleting duplicated tribute records only seems like good data hygiene, but that is not what we are talking about here. This is regarding deleting donor records. I just don't get the purpose. Christine Cooke bCREPro‍ likes to point out that Bill Connors‍' post about to delete or not to delete. I think it might be relevant here. I just don't think that there's much gained, but the potential for a lot lost. On top of trying to determine if it's worth the time and effort.

  • Rose Dixon
    Rose Dixon
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant
    Oh yeah, we don't ever delete donor records. I was responding to where you say you didn't understand why tribute records without donations were added. If you have the tribute module, they "must" be added (even if they have no giving) because that's how the tribute module works; it creates a record for every IHO/IMO.
  • Dariel Dixon
    Dariel Dixon Community All-Star
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management
    Rose Dixon:

    Oh yeah, we don't ever delete donor records. I was responding to where you say you didn't understand why tribute records without donations were added. If you have the tribute module, they "must" be added (even if they have no giving) because that's how the tribute module works; it creates a record for every IHO/IMO.

    Rose Dixon‍ I was referring to the creation of the donor record, not the tribute record. I understand that you need a tribute record that may not have gifts, but you should have a minimum amount of information to create a record; donor, tribute, or otherwise. That's what I was questioning.

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