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Deleting constituents' phone numbers after a phone cleanse

Lena Payne

We have a few thousand constituents with inactive phone numbers on their records - how do we go about getting rid of these numbers? I can see there is a plug in one could use but it seems so complicated. There is no way to do a global delete. We use Omatic but can't think how it would help. What would you do? Any thoughts welcome. Thank you!

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Constituent Records

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Accepted answers

Carlene Johnson

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/309309#Comment_309309

I’d be cautious about using a global change for this. If a constituent has more than one phone number marked as Home, a global change will update all of them to Invalid, which may not be what you want.

A safer approach is to export the data to Excel, clean everything up there, and then import it back into RE. That process gives you full control over which numbers are updated, and you can add the Invalid flag during the import as well.

I suggest using the Create Import File functionality for your export. It gives you a clean, structured file to work from, and makes the whole update process much easier to manage.

Amy Dana

100% this is the way to go. I can't tell you how many times I've had a volunteer or board member give me a number out of their rolodex that they haven't called for years…and it's the number that's out of service. I also recommend creating a comment for the number, something like "inactive confirmed 12/5/25" so there's no question as to why it's no longer a valid number.

Joe Moretti

To make a phone number inactive, you will need to do an import, since this does not exist on a global change. You can use global change to change the phone type as long as you have a query of all those phone numbers that are inactive, that way other phones will not be affected, but you can also do this as an import as well.

All comments

Carlene Johnson

Two questions:

1) Are those phone numbers marked in your system in any way other than the "inactive" checkbox?
2) Is there any problem leaving the inactive phone numbers in there? Is it causing any problems?

If you really do want to remove them, the best way is following this Knowledgebase Solution.

I typically don't delete inactive phone numbers as seeing those inactive ones allows me to not add back the same information onto the record.

Joe Moretti

I agree with Carlene. I would not delete those inactive phones. Those can also help when it comes to duplicated records. If those phones are not a phone type of Former Phones, I suggest to just do a query of all inactive phones, then globally change them to Former Phones. I feel this is the best way to handle that. The plugin is not a good way to deal with inactive phones.

Lena Payne

Thank you both @Joe Moretti @Carlene Johnson. Great suggestion! Currently the phone numbers are just on the records as live phone numbers - we used a company to run a check on all phone numbers we hold on RE and got the data back that several thousands are no longer valid.

I can see that we can change the phone type from say Home to Invalid in global change, would marking them inactive need to be done through import?

Carlene Johnson

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/309309#Comment_309309

I suggest using the Create Import File functionality for your export. It gives you a clean, structured file to work from, and makes the whole update process much easier to manage.

Amy Dana

Joe Moretti

Don Burrhus

We leave Inactive phones on records. We have used the plugin to mass-delete duplicated phone numbers (after having exported a copy of ALL Phones and their details to CSV) and changing the ones to be deleted to a "To Delete" Phone Type.