Export of Donor Records - temporary removal from the database

John Geoffrion 3

Hi. We have Raisers Edge and Luminate Online; RE is where our donor info lives, LO is our primary house for constituent data. Our current contract has a cap of 25k records for RE, and we have been notified by BB that we're over our cap by a few hundred, and have to address it before Jan 5th to avoid being bumped into the new record cap tier and charged accordingly.

To keep us under our 25k record cap, thru the end of our current contract at least, we are contemplating removing a large chunk of our donor data; say for example, long-lapsed donors. Not deleting them, because we want to preserve that historical information, just exporting them off RE for the time being, to re-import at a later date as we determine what the future of our relationship with BB will be.

I've approached our BB account reps with this idea (waiting for reply) but also want to open it up to the forum. Have any of you done this? What do we need to consider?

Karen Diener 2

@John Geoffrion:

Hi. We have Raisers Edge and Luminate Online; RE is where our donor info lives, LO is our primary house for constituent data. Our current contract has a cap of 25k records for RE, and we have been notified by BB that we're over our cap by a few hundred, and have to address it before Jan 5th to avoid being bumped into the new record cap tier and charged accordingly.

To keep us under our 25k record cap, thru the end of our current contract at least, we are contemplating removing a large chunk of our donor data; say for example, long-lapsed donors. Not deleting them, because we want to preserve that historical information, just exporting them off RE for the time being, to re-import at a later date as we determine what the future of our relationship with BB will be.

I've approached our BB account reps with this idea (waiting for reply) but also want to open it up to the forum. Have any of you done this? What do we need to consider?

I have worked with clients to delete large numbers of constituent records, but we never delete records with gifts. I suppose that scenario will probably present itself at some time, but everyone has been able to get below their record band without worrying about gift records.

Depending on the organization's needs, I run a query of constituents who have no giving, no relationships, no tribute information, no appeals, no event attendance, no attributes, etc. Basically nothing on the record except a name and possibly some contact information. That is often the first wave to be deleted. I'll output the date the constituent was added, and sometimes the date last changed. The latter is not always accurate, but when I see large groups of records added in 2016 that have not been changed since 2016, it is a pretty good sign that they aren't being used!

Then I'll start looking at those who might have attributes, and whether or not they are meaningful. Attributes are often the junk drawer of Raiser's Edge, and even though there may be some, they may not be useful in any way.

I often export everything about the constituents before I delete them. In my last paragraph, I reference a whitepaper that discusses this though.) As many people are aware, there is no “undo” button in RE, so when a constituent is deleted, they are deleted.

Your Blackbaud rep will probably recommend against deleting records. But you know your data better than anyone. People may try to convince you that “there's a reason these people are in your database and you shouldn't just get rid of them.” And while that absolutely can be true, every client I've worked with has had very obvious records to delete. Yes, there are constituents in the database, but they were added because they lived in the neighborhood where the office is, or were friends of long-ago board members and they never donated, or a volunteer handed over the mailing list from another organization. Most often, the nonprofit has NO idea how / why they got there.

Bill Connors does have a whitepaper he wrote about why this may not be worth your time. This was written in 2016 so is a little dated, but a lot of ideas still apply. While I do agree with what he says, more often than not, I have found instances where we can easily find large groups of constituents worth deleting, without investing too much time.

Karen

Cathy Spencer

@Karen Diener, Thank you for your thoughtful suggestions. They are helpful to me as I'm going through the same situation of approaching the records cap.

I'm going to put a sticky note on my monitor: Attributes are the junk drawer of Raiser's Edge. ?

Dina Rieman

@Karen Diener @John Geoffrion Thanks John for your post and Karen for all your great info. I'm also dealing with the same issue so this is very helpful.

We have donors in RE that were brought over from our legacy system when we went to RE in 1998 that have not donated since. A total of the gifts was brought over as one gift with a generic fund. I'm starting with these - exporting the donor and gift info to excel then deleting. We've also looked at attributes in consideration and love your comment that attributes are the junk drawer of RE - it's so true. ?

Bill Connor's white paper gave me pause about deleting records. Your comments on that have given me more confidence in our approach. Thanks again!

Karen Diener 2

@Dina Rieman

I chatted briefly with Bill yesterday about his whitepaper, and he said that while it should be updated (he hasn't had the time) his opinion has not changed. I do want to reiterate that I have tremendous respect for him, but don't agree 100% on this one.

I think all databases and all nonprofits are different. You need to be very thoughtful about what you bring in AND what you end up removing. I would advise you to NOT remove gifts because this can impact reporting, among other issues.

Deleting constituent records only buys you time. If it is a relatively easy process to identify very obvious groups of constituents to delete, I say to go ahead. But each organization will get to the point of diminishing returns where they have removed everything that is “easy”, and may start removing what they shouldn't just to keep under the record band. Plan now to budget appropriately.

Karen

John Geoffrion 3

@Karen Diener
As I noted in my original post, we don't intend to delete these records, just temporarily store them offline for a period of time.

Full disclosure, we're migrating to a new (non-BB) CRM next year, and we want to stay comfortably under our 25k record cap thru the duration of our contract. We removed 4k very old non-donor constituent records already last January, but we're back over the cap again, and want to avoid moving to the next record band. This means, alas, the only candidates are long-lapsed donors.

We intend to include these donors in the new CRM. They're not disappearing. Just… taking a vacation.

Adrienne Baumann 2

@Karen Diener I appreciate your input on this subject! (I'm glad I searched before posting a new topic!) We're in the same predicament being close to our limit of records for our price tier. We use the email feature in RE-NXT, so anyone who subscribes to our email newsletters is added as a constituent, including employees. That adds a few hundred constituent records. Any suggestions on how to manage this more efficiently?