There seems to be two ways to mark a deceased individual and we’re wondering which is the preferred practice. Or are both ways necessary?
One way is to go to the Constituents tab and mark the record Inactive and choose Deceased as the reason. This changes the Status to Inactive and shows that the individual is deceased on the General tab.
Another way is to change the Status to Deceased. A grayed-out D appears next to the name if the individual is part of a household. However, the name disappears from under the ID number and the record is still active.
What’s the best practice?
Thank you,
Annette Griswold
John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Sheboygan, WI 53081
We change the status to deceased but don’t inactivate the account if there are any current-season subscriptions, future tickets, or active or lapsed memberships. We never inactivate certain accounts, such as those that have, thanks to endowment gifts or other such, ongoing program names that need to get pulled. I audit deceased accounts occasionally and inactivate some.
In version 10, we’d look for accounts that had a deceased N1 as one of the first segments and clean those up every time we ran an extraction for customer contact purposes. I’m not exactly sure how we’ll handle this in version 11 yet. We’ve only been on it for a couple of weeks! Something that has been very helpful, though, with mailing lists is to add t_customer.sort_name to my mailing list output set, and to sort lists by that. The deceased patrons float to the top (their sort names have nothing but a slash), and are easily found and inactivated before the final extraction is run. Obviously, that’s a pretty inefficient way to handle keeping deceased patrons out of mailings—but, until I come up with something better, it is working.
Lucie
_____________________________Lucie SpielerIT Development and Training Manager
Editor, Season Program BookFLORIDA GRAND opera
Hi Lucie -
Have you tried suppressing Name 1 Status in Deceased (from the Constituent folder). In version 11 this would catch any affiliate accounts that have been marked as deceased but not inactivated. It would not work for household accounts as there's no way of marking a household account as deceased without inactivating it (that I'm aware of).
HTH,
Heather