Deleting constituents with no gifts

Erin Pirkle
Erin Pirkle
Third Anniversary Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

Hey everyone! My organization is starting the RE clean up process and one thing we want to do is delete constituents that have no gift history AND no address information. Some constituents were moved from a previous program and are not needed and are taking up space. Does anyone have experience with this or something similar? Thank you!

Comments

  • Erin Pirkle
    Erin Pirkle
    Third Anniversary Facilitator 1

    Thanks for the information and for the reminder to check that the whole record is empty.

    Most of the constituents I pulled have no address, gifts, relationships, attributes or other contact information.

    I'm mainly looking for the best process to identify these constituents. I'll most likely still look at each record before deleting permanently

  • Marilyn Armstrong
    Marilyn Armstrong
    Third Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1

    I'm with you on those empty records – no address, no gifts, no relationships, no events - they're just taking up space and get in the way. I've never done it globally, though. I'd query for certain pieces to produce a manageable list that I could go through individually and delete that way. Tedious and takes time but I felt more secure that way.

  • Nicholas Mascari
    Nicholas Mascari
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    I agree with the other posts: Be very careful about the list you pull.

    With that said, the actual query would look something like this

    Criteria:

    Summary Information → Summary For Gift → Total Number of Gifts equals 0

    AND

    Addresses → Preferred Address → Preferred Address Line 1 blank

    You can then output whatever information your organization needs to look at before just deleting them all in one fell swoop. Like the other posts have said: Do they have attributes, relationships, prospect info, etc.? You may want to include those in your Query's output before making a final decision.

    Then you (or whoever has access) can go to Admin → Globally Delete Records → pick Constituents and the query you saved earlier then run it.

    If you have any questions let me know,

    -Nick

  • Rachel Cavalier
    Rachel Cavalier Community All-Star
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 5 PowerUp Challenge - Chat for Blackbaud AI Task 3 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    Keith Wilson:

    Certainly in agreement with the others who have commented, but I don't see mention of Tribute Records. RE requires a Tribute to be a Constituent in order to create a Tribute Gift. We end up with a bunch of Constituent Records (obviously many are deceased) who have no address, no gifts, no attributes, etc. but they have tribute gifts linked to them. Really wish BB would create a way to do tribute gifts without requiring the Tribute to be a constituent.

    Would having a specific constituent record for these tributes work for you? Rather than creating new constituents with only names, perhaps just put that information on the tribute record of an In Memory constituent?

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