Globally Deleting Records with Gifts

Brandon Atkison · January 2017

Hello,

We have encountered a little probelm within our database. We have reached the number of allotted records per Blackbaud. I know the easiest solution would be to just pony up the money in order to be bumped to the next tier. Well being a state ran institution that money was not budgeted into this fiscal year, so I will have to wait until the next fiscal year. Anyway, I know it is frowned upon within development communities, but I have exhausted all other options. I have to look at archiving historical donors. I have queried last gift date with anything less than or equal to 12/31/1999 and have close to 5000 records. The biggest question I have for the community is when/if I delete these records and the giving history, will this negatively affect the fund the money was previously held? Btw we aren't linked to FE.

JoAnn Strommen · January 2017

My opinion, If you're looking at an annual fund from 18 years ago probably not. Books/records/auditing would have been completed years ago. If there are gifts to a fund that you are still running reports for cumulative amount say like endowment it would have an effect on the dollar figure the report pulls. Sort of depends on what kind of reports you anticipate running/needing to me.

I'm assuming that if you do that type of clean up that you would be exporting the records and giving data to Excel or another format to maintain for historical purposes.

Elaine Tucker · January 2017

If you MUST go this route, I would sugggest the following:

1. ARCHIVE all the Donor Records in an Access or Excell file.

2. Summarize by fund/Campaign all the gifts in the File

3. Create a constituent record in re called "Historical Gifts Archive"

4. Enter a gift for each "summary" that you have from the ARCHIVED file. - for example if your summary shows that during FY 1980 you had $15,000 to your annual fund and $1,200 to your STATE Donation fund, then enter 1 gift dated 12-31-80 for $15,000 to the annual Fund and a second gift dated 12-31-80 for $1,200 to your STATE donation fund.

This way, you can keep the archival financial history in RE, but you just will not have all the Detail.

If you wanted to go the extra route, you could create non-constituent relationships in the HISTORICAL Gifts Archive which would list all the donors you archived, that way if you ever had to have a quick look at who was there it would be centrally located in RE.

A thing to keep in mind when you do these type of Data Archives are they going to be "easily" or "logically" followed once you are no longer with the organization?

Good Luck

Ryan Hyde · January 2017

I agree with JoAnn's assessment entirely. It depends on your org, but unless you're doing reporting still from that long ago, it shouldn't really have any impact on your day to day operations.

However, I need to ask, do you typically set up both spouses in a household as separate constituents? If you do, I may have a novel solution for you. Last year I flattened out more than 20k of these types of records in my own database without actually losing any information. It's a bit involved, but I'd be happy to talk you through it some time.

Christine Cooke 2 · January 2017

Brandon Atkison:

Hello,

We have encountered a little probelm within our database. We have reached the number of allotted records per Blackbaud. I know the easiest solution would be to just pony up the money in order to be bumped to the next tier. Well being a state ran institution that money was not budgeted into this fiscal year, so I will have to wait until the next fiscal year. Anyway, I know it is frowned upon within development communities, but I have exhausted all other options. I have to look at archiving historical donors. I have queried last gift date with anything less than or equal to 12/31/1999 and have close to 5000 records. The biggest question I have for the community is when/if I delete these records and the giving history, will this negatively affect the fund the money was previously held? Btw we aren't linked to FE.

If you remove/delete records with a history you break the integrity of your data. This is not just about being linked up with FE, that is not the issue. You lose your ability to do any analytical work with your constituents/donors AND if they do give now, you will not know that they have a history.

Please read this:

http://www.billconnors.com/media/Raisers Edge NXT Pricing - To Delete or Not Delete Constituents.pdf

Karen Stuhlfeier · January 2017

Excellent advice. Creating a record to store the summary of the deleted gifts makes good sense.

Jen Claudy · January 2017

Will you be increasing your budget for the next FY to be able to move up to the next tier? If so, and especially if that next year starts in less than 6 mos, I would seriously consider saving the time and headache from this process. Call your BB Account Manager and find out whether you will need to pay the additional costs now or when your contract renews...and if it's now, ask if BB would defer it. If your contract renews before the next FY, talk with your Finance Dept. I.e. if your contract renews May 1 and your FY starts Jul 1, you may be okay because your Finance Dept may be considering that as a FY18 expense, or at least prorated as such.

Personally, I would exhaust all possibilities before archiving/deleting records. Particularly with gifts on them.

However, if you really have no other options, then I would definitely consider the other comments here from Elaine, Ryan, and JoAnn. Also give a read to Bill Connors' white paper on deleting records for NXT pricing reasons (the link in Christine's comment). In particular, keep in mind the security of exporting data and storing it outside of the database. I particularly like Elaine's thought of creating one Constituent Record with gifts for each Fund/Timeframe and Relationship Records to store the donor data. If storing in Excel or Access, use the Attachment feature to put those files in your database on a dummy record...more secure, and also can be easier to find for your eventual successor.

Ryan Hyde · January 2017

Elaine, that's a brilliant solution! I mean, as with all of these solutions it should only be used in cases of extreme durress, but this makes so much more sense than either simply deleting and forgetting the info or exporting out to excel/access and trying to maintain two separate databases. I'm going to keep this idea in my back pocket.

JoAnn Strommen · January 2017

Elaine, Kudos! The summary record is a great idea when this type of record cleansing is necessary!

Brandon Atkison · January 2017

Ryan Hyde:

I agree with JoAnn's assessment entirely. It depends on your org, but unless you're doing reporting still from that long ago, it shouldn't really have any impact on your day to day operations.

However, I need to ask, do you typically set up both spouses in a household as separate constituents? If you do, I may have a novel solution for you. Last year I flattened out more than 20k of these types of records in my own database without actually losing any information. It's a bit involved, but I'd be happy to talk you through it some time.

We do not. We only set them up as separate constituents for prospect reasons or if they give a gift on separate occasions.

Ryan Hyde · January 2017

Blast. Well then I vote for Elaine's strategy, but only after you talk to Blackbaud as Jen suggested.

Sunshine Reinken Watson · January 2017

This could take some time, but here is another idea that could work if you are just trying to eliminate Constituent records:

1) Export all constituent records that you are archiving for possible future importing if you increase funding. Do a seperate export for all the gifts.

2) Create an individual and organization record for historical gifts.

3) Import the gifts back into those two constituent records. Add gift attributes for the original constiuent record ID and name.

4) Run some reports to check that all the gifts are in there before deleting the constituent records.

(5) If you ever import all the records back into the system, the historical gift constituent records could be deleted.

Heather MacKenzie · January 2017

I second all the great ideas already suggested, but just wanted to double check that you have thoroughly searched for duplicate records in your database. My database has a ton of these because prior data entry folks thought that there had to be a separate whole record for the tribute gifts and didn't know that they could just put them all under the tribute tab in the main record. If you have this kind of double entry in your RE database, what about buying the tribute module instead and merging your "duplicates?" I wonder if that could fit into your current budget?

Jennifer McHale · January 2017

Just as an FYI ...

I had recently received a back-up of my database, since we were undergoing a clean-up in our transition to NXT. We were going to delete/merge fields, but wanted to keep a back-up, in case historical information become important down the road.

Apparently, you can't open a database back-up when you're hosted ... and a local copy of RE is not available once you transition to NXT.

Support has been fabulous and is working with me, but didn't want others to get caught in this situation!

Ryan Hyde · January 2017

Support has been fabulous and is working with me, but didn't want others to get caught in this situation!

Wow, I didn't know this! Thanks for the heads up!

Globally Deleting Records with Gifts

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