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 or evidence that the address we had for them was no longer valid.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.
The good thing with this particular subset of old records is that nothing is being sent to them. They don't have any activity since we moved to Tessitura so they aren't getting pulled into extractions. Our general mailing list requires a contact point purpose on the mailing address and there really has to be something to trigger getting pulled into an email list (other than just having an email list). We didn't have a ticketing system before Tessitura, so any historical data lives on the Promotions tab (and we don't use that for lists).