I'm curious to know why/when other organizations inactivate records. We're still sorting out when we want to use it. We have been inactivating deceased individuals, but would it be better to just mark them as deceased and not inactivate them? I can't think of a reason why one would be preferable over the other. I've been inactivating so we an keep a complete picture of what the record looked like, including attributes that would pull people into a mailing list, etc., without having to worry about them getting pulled. But since we use "deceased" as a suppression, as well as inactive, do we need to do the extra step? Or does it really not matter? I'm going through some very old legacy data while we are closed and am less concerned with these people who have been deceased for 10+ years, but going forward I'd like to create a policy that will best manage our current data. Or am I totally over thinking this? :-)
Thanks!
AnneThe Historic New Orleans Collection
We often, but don't always deactivate accounts when someone passes away. Depending on the situation, we sometimes change them to an "estate" account and rename the account "Estate of____" and put donations in their memory there.
Deactivating the account does help some with data cleanliness. It prevents staff from making changes and updating the wrong person. They also show up in search as inactive so staff don't have to click into the record.
We've been waffling and this just convinced me to deactivate the deceased records. It definitely makes it easier to notice who is deceased, particularly when it is part of a household. Thank you everyone for your help!