Importing 'Do Not Contact' Appends for Phone Numbers

Tal Segal 2

RE has a best practice where users cannot globally change a group of phone numbers into 'DNC' numbers (https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/107809). My organization just received an append, where Blackbaud recommends manual entry (over something that would take weeks to enter). I wonder if anyone else has a work-around for doing a global change for bad phone numbers.

Aaron Rothberg

Two options that come to my mind are using Import to mark them as Inactive or to change the Phone Type to Do Not Contact. I feel your pain. I too have wanted to do a mass update of DNCs on emails.


I would add that if by "bad" you mean the phone numbers are incorrect and do not actually call that constituent, I would delete them. I keep old email address and Inactive them, but not phone numbers. Once a phone number is no longer valid for that constituent, I don't see any value in keeping it on file.

Tal Segal 2

Thank you Aaron! Those are good ideas!

Alan French

If you have ImportOmatic, that allows you to import data for the DNC field. It doesn't use phone import IDs though, it only matches phone numbers based on type, so if you allow a constituent to have multiple phones of the same type then that may not work for you as it'll just update the first phone number it comes to on the constituent record that has the specified type, which is not necessarily the one you want to change.

Faith Murray

We do keep the last 3 phone numbers. It helps, because sometimes appends haul in old data, and we may have more current info on that constituent than the append provides. If you write over your old phone numbers (or addresses) en masse, you will not know if the append brought you a previous phone number. Appends ideally will indicate the certainty level of their data, although I have only had an append do this twice, and sometimes the certainty level is only middling.


DNC ideally would be used to indicate if a donor has asked not to be contacted via that phone number. Thus the reason bulk DNCs are not supported. For administrator changes and updates, it's better to mark them Inactive or change the phone type, as Aaron suggested. It may not seem important with phone numbers, but with emails, the practice becomes important for certain email software, and to delineate whether a donor prefers no contact whatsoever through that medium, or if the email/number is fine to use for personal communications only (as opposed to bulk messages).


 

Melissa S Graves

We use special phone types now simply because we can't import the DNC flag. So frustrating.