When we went live with Tessitura in 2018, we imported a lot of data that had not been maintained over the years. I spent a lot of time in 2020 going through records of people who are actively on our mailing list to look for deceased (some had been gone 10+years!) or evidence that the address we had for them was no longer valid. But there are a lot of other records that are just sitting there because they aren't on the mailing list and they haven't purchased a ticket or made a contribution since we went live. As we come across these kinds of records we have been inactivating them with a reason of "No Activity." But I'm just curious if other organizations have policies surrounding when to deactivate records. And does it matter if they are active if we aren't pulling them into lists? We run our mailing lists through NCOA via our mail house (and I update changes), but we aren't currently using one of the integrations for NCOA. On the one hand, they are just sitting there and not being pulled in, but I hate the idea of a bunch of inaccurate and unused records just sitting there. Interested to hear how others handle things.
Anne Robichaux (she/her)CRM AdministratorThe Historic New Orleans Collection
We also make deceased patrons inactive (and of course we do so as well with bot/spam accounts; that is a given). We have seen no issues arise through our processes due to this, and in fact our Development department appreciates it.
The BIG thing I think, is to make sure your patron activity matches those accounts you are pulling for mailings/e-mails. Yes, the patron who bought tickets 11 years ago might still live there and still use that e-mail address and still might WANT to buy tickets to that one event that is almost exactly like the one they attended 11 years ago. But is it really worth still including that patron in your lists? Certainly you COULD make it inactive to make sure it steers clear. But I would just have better criteria in my extractions.
John A. Moskal II said:We also make deceased patrons inactive
Something we've tried to do (in the before time at least) is to convert deceased constituents that we expect to do some/any further activity with to customer type = Estate, which leaves things active, transactable, etc., and keeps them out of marketing pulls.
A discussion that has gone back and forth internally. Our Development Strategy person (that team's data person and my #1 counterpart in that department) is of the opinion that such things should be given separate accounts and treated as a Foundation/Estate based on the circumstances because in that case it is no longer that person transacting but a separate individual or group of individuals transacting in the name of that person.
I can see both sides to the argument here, but since she is so tight in her own data practices (I love not having to come down on Development for tidy data because she does it for me), I figured I would let her have her way on this one. As long as each living individual only has one account, I am happy (I had to win that fight about 5 years ago where multiple accounts would be created under one person's name if they were doing things to be mailed to work or home). So I am good enough with this approach.