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Deleting Records To Make More Space

Michael Catrino

Hi everyone,

Does anyone have any standard practices set in place for deleting inactive constituents? My organization is especially interested in this right now because we don't want to go over our maximum number of constituents in our database. I would greatly appreciate any advice.

Thanks!

Michael

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Joe Moretti

We have deleted records, but only older records, one that do not have any gifts and have been sitting for a long time, ones with no contact information. That would be a safe start.

Dariel Dixon

I would advise caution with this approach. There's lots of things to consider when making the decision to delete records. I'd recommend finding @Bill Connors white paper on this. Let's start with the basics that @Joe Moretti mentioned: No gifts, no contact info, among other fields. And that's only if there's other considerations to take into account. At an education-based organization, you might not want to delete alumni without gifts if your CRM is the database of record.

As you can see, you'll have to create your own flowchart of when a record can be deleted as these factors vary wildly from organization to organization. I would also mention that this is only a minimal gain; your organization should be growing, and what will you do when you are in this situation again? I would truly consider if the juice is worth the squeeze, if you smell what the Rock is cookin'.

Jack Briggs

We have deletions but very few, and primarily Event Registrants that have no other/subsequent affiliation with our education institution, and there are time periods associated with when we can do this. Nearly everyone else is alumni so we don't have 'inactive' constituents, really!

Dylan Medina

I agree with the above on finding those with no gifts, no contacts, and no event participations. Even then make sure to review each record for anything that is worth keeping.

A population that helped me reduce records is previously if a person passed away we'd make their spouse a constituent. Going through those I found a lot of spouses that did not give again or stay connected at all. They take more time because I would ensure to re-document anything and then delete and then put the spouse back as a relationship record.

Bobby Steurer

That's the second old-school wrestling comment I've seen from you this month. Dixon 3:16?

Dariel Dixon

Since you've pointed it out, there was a time (a loong time ago) when I might have indulged in the realms of sports entertainment. At this time, I don't even consider them to be wrestling based, just pop culture references at this time. That eyebrow guy, I mean he's crossed over to the point that I don't think anyone even thinks about his time in the Feder…I mean WWE.

Bobby Steurer

Brother, I think we all indulged in that realm back then. I may or may not have been in the audience at Judgement Day 2000.

Aldera Chisholm

Lots of great info in this thread. I'd add - before you look at reducing, do a very thorough de-dupe, looking beyond what RE indicates your duplicates are. This can mean manually skimming through downloaded lists. The most common ones I find to de-dupe are: spouses that aren't flagged as spouses - connect as many into one record and a relationship as you can. Folks who have two records, one with their home address, one with their business address. (Easier to connect these when they have their work email on their personal record!)

Once you know your data is as clean as it can be, then re-evaluate. If you have records you can truly remove with no impact, that's great, but know that this is a band-aid solution - you are going to creep back up to that record band if you don't implement a policy of when you should and shouldn't be adding constituents. So, if you do remove, look for what the commonality is of why they were added in the first place, and try to address that in your policy and processes.

Rachel Kulsdom

We are a bit more open to deleting, but we are in the UK and when GDPR came in we took a stricter stance on we just can't keep data 'in case'. So, we have a lot of nuance, but roughly speaking, we do an annual cull removing records that have been on the database over 2/3 years and not given anything and are not contactable in any way - lead gen, did one event and never gave, enquries….

For those that have donated, we have to keep the records for 7 years, but if they haven't given in over that time, and are NOT contactable in any way, we would delete. We check for other interactions - attended an event recently, pledged to give a legacy, have a collection tin, have an active spouse….and protect them. But we do get rid of maybe 10,000 records a year.

However, what we do, is we have a series of exports created, and we do export some basic info about these, and we save them in csv archives that very few people can access, and we keep them there in case of contentious Wills or another strong reason to dive the archive. It's all in our privacy policies, but we found we had so many useless records on database costing us money that we can't contact and are inactive, so we took them out of RE.

Agnieszka Wilks

Yes, we carry out an annual data deletion exercise in line with our company’s data retention policy. We started about five years ago, when we removed around 500k records. The volume has now reduced to around 130–150k records per year.

Bobby Steurer

If it's not too much to ask, what's that data deletion exercise look like? 500K records is a lot, and even 130K-150K records annually is a not-insignificant volume. I've worked for organizations that (wrongly) virtually never delete anything, ever. So, I'd be curious to hear the process from the opposite end of that.

Agnieszka Wilks

We have defined criteria in our Data Retention Policy, and I provide the Fundraising Senior Leadership Team with the numbers due for deletion by Constituent Code for awareness, along with the number of records that qualify for deletion under each criterion. They then sign off the deletion.

Before carrying out the deletion, I do a final check for anyone who has been “reactivated”, as there are always some people who take action again after years of no activity. I also check for any open batches. Then I import the URNS for deletion in batches of 10,000 constituents, before proceeding with the deletion.

We always request a database backup to our test database before a deletion exercise. This is a precaution in the unlikely event that we need to investigate a deleted record — although this has never happened so far.

I also retain a list of the removed URNs, names and postcodes on a secure drive for six months, in case we need to identify or investigate someone after deletion.

Even after these deletions, we still have just over 1 million records in the database, so it is important for us to keep inactive and obsolete records under control.

I completely support removing unused data from the database. In the UK, we have a compliance obligation to ensure personal data is not retained for longer than necessary, so having a clear and consistently applied retention process is really important.

Bobby Steurer

Thanks for sharing. The largest database I've worked in had roughly 400K records, so hearing about numbers greater than that is very interesting. Appreciate the efforts that go into maintaining that data.