Cleaning up previously "shared" email addresses

Bianca Gonzalez

Hi folks, I'd love your help in tackling this.

We are needing to re-activate some emails that were accidentally altered to inactive over the past couple years. Initially, we thought to just re-activate all of these emails and work with our email service to determine which emails have unsubscribed and need to be changed back to inactive.

However, we discovered that due to the BB update which moved contact information to the Bio 1 tab, eliminating shared “phones”, we would be re-activating emails that don't actually belong to the constituent but actually belong to their relative.

My question for you: has anyone else faced this issue? Is their any way to identify these email addresses that were once shared?

Thank you!

Dariel Dixon 2

@Bianca Gonzalez There is some context that I think you might be missing that might help your decision making here. The update that I think you're talking about happened several years ago. I don't know if it is worth it to try to re-activate these emails as this data is significantly stale, and would probably not be as beneficial as you expect. While constituents can have the same email listed, I don't know if it is worth the trouble that this project would entail, especially for such old data.

Bianca Gonzalez

@Dariel Dixon Thank you for your response! I agree, these emails are the ones that we would like to remain inactive. However, we have other accurate emails that were mistakenly inactivated (not a part of this group of old shared emails) due to our CORE integration. These are the emails we would like to re-activate, not the old shared ones. It is a bit difficult to explain but I was wondering if there was a way to determine which of these inactive emails are remnants of the shared emails so we can leave those as inactive, only re-activating the emails that were mistakenly inactivated following the update.

Dariel Dixon 2

@Bianca Gonzalez I think this is a completely different situation. Everything you describe will all depend on the data you have. There's no way to determine where these emails were inactivated, however there may be some SKY datapoints that might allow you to determine when those records were inactivated. Perhaps you may know of a date range that some of those emails that may be good were inactivated.

You would need a way to query on those records in the system, whether that be Date Last Changed or Last Changed By or some other criteria. Perhaps there is a already established static query when these emails were inactivated. If it were relatively recently, it might be worth looking at a backup, but from your post it sounds like these were done quite a while ago. I think it is worth considering how much time and effort it will take to determine which emails are good and which are not.

Elizabeth Johnson

@Bianca Gonzalez @Dariel Dixon has some really good points. If you still want to clean this up I would as he said query the records in the system and then using the Export tool in conjunction with the Import tool export all the fields you need for the import along with name fields and other key data that would help you and then clean it up in a csv file (isolating the records that need updating and making the necessary changes) and import. You can ignore the fields that you don't need in the import from the larger export. Hope that helps.

Bianca Gonzalez

@Elizabeth Johnson @Dariel Dixon Just wanted to provide an update on what we landed on. Dariel, your advice was very helpful. I did end up querying for the dates our inactive phones were last changed and compiled my list based on the dates when this incident occurred. A helpful indicator was creating an export that allowed me to view which of the phones on this list were listed as primary. My list of numbers to go through and spot check is now much more manageable after taking into account all of these variables. Elizabeth, I do plan on utilizing import with my final group I would like to reactivate. Thanks for your help, all!