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 or evidence that the address we had for them was no longer valid.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
Hi Anne, like Caryl we have a set of purge criteria. I run it weekly in Segmentation/Extraction Manager. We too went live in 2019 with a load of data that had never been cleaned before and come from two previous ticketing systems, from a time when the team (30 years ago) didn't even take addresses or even first names etc, it was a mess!. Our first purge using the criteria set was for 38k records if I remember rightly. We got support to do those in bulk for us as it was too many to do manually and not cost effective. It was about a fifth of our customer records!! It is visibly noticeable when you are working in orders with the amount of constituents returned on search. It also helps with the merge tool returns. Our criteria looks at criteria like e-newsletter subscription, and also if they have even opened an email that has been sent to them. We use 6 years as our cut off so that any HMRC tax queries regarding gift aid can be easily answered - I don't think you have that in the US though. We didn't want to get rid of anyone who was still opening our emails, even if they hadn't bought a ticket, but that might not be everyone's choice. We also don't purge any business or school records either - that's all done manually by the respective departments. I'm happy to answer any questions, feel free to msg me. Each week we have about 20-60 records that come up in the purge count that need setting for purging...its really worth doing.