Inactive reasons

One thing to keep in mind: inactivating the record means no changes can be made to it. If you just want to make an account always suppressed from all marketing and solicitation, you might want to do that with an attribute or something, rather than inactivating the entire account. Unless you're sure the people in question not only do not qualify for marketing or solicitation, but also would be unlikely to have any new activity. Which I guess goes back to what the reason for the inactivation is...

We generally only inactivate if someone is deceased, or if the info in the account is so bad/unclear/incomplete (usually from conversion) as to make it completely unclear who/what the account belonged to and thus we want to prevent anything new from going into it.

We're suppressing them based off of their marketing and soliciting restrictions.  We're looking to name the "Reason" for inactivating a record that we no longer want to add any activity on. 

Thanks Amanda,

We're inactivating records that we're no longer going to add any activity to.  What do you name the reason for inactivating a bad record.  Do you use "Bad Record" or name is something else?

Thanks for your help,

Tatiana

For those we're just using "default inactive reason", since it's there, there are so few of them, and since we really only have the two possible reasons. If it started seeming like we had new, more specific reasons for inactivating we might actually track them specifically, but at this point that hasn't been the case. At one point I considered switching to "bad import" as a reason, but nobody really cared so we didn't bother. It was just assumed, if it were inactive and not deceased it was a bad import. 

I mean, we usually very rarely go so far as to inactivate an account. Usually it's pretty obvious by looking at it why it'd be inactive. So for us, the reason wasn't as important because it was unlikely we'd run into a situation of someone looking at an account and wondering "why is this inactive? it looks fine". 

Actually, the first few years we didn't even have a specific different reason for "deceased" since usually the name would already have that as a namestatus. But it did make it slightly easier to one-stop-shop see that as the inactive reason, instead of checking all the generically inactivated people for deceasedness. Sorry not to be more helpful.

I was also thinking about leaving it as default, but we've already added 2 other reasons, "Deceased" and "Entity Closed".  Default doesn't seem to fit in there.  

But, thank you for your help.

Tatiana 

Thank you Jackie.  I'll enter it as an option to our voting committee.

Tatiana

We also have a constituent type called "dummy accounts", and we suppress those from mailings etc. Dummy accounts we really don't want used anymore are inactivated, but some are in use and get suppressed just by virtue of the cust type. Might be worth considering as well.