FundSvcs Community

I would look at it a different way.  What do you gain by purging ANY records?

I am not aware of any significant file storage savings you may find.  And even if your vendor charges you by the record, you can mark certain records as inactive to exclude them from being sent to the cloud.

Certainly, the records would not have been added to the CRM without a good reason.  That reason likely has stayed the same.  They were important!

Did those friends you purged make a gift in previous years?  While they didn't last year, why wouldn't they next year?  The Pandemic was tough on a lot of people.  And the TCJA is causing many lower-wealth families to bundle their gifts and donate only once every 2-3 years.

And who is to say that some of these records you have purged didn't, or won't, put you in their will?

You should never purge a donor record, even when they die.  These should be permanent records of giving.

What does your leadership have against donors who haven't recently given or have given very little?

John

I thought I recalled a similar discussion on the APRA listserv, PRSPCT-L, several years ago. Thankfully, my good friend and (now retired) consultant Robert Weiner compiled some of the responses.

Below is the original question. Afterward, selected responses (some similar to mine) advocating for never purging. I hope these snippets help your cause!

"My organization is working on a data retention policy and wondering if others have insights to share. There seems to be a feeling we should remove any records that have not had an action in 7 years. I'm a bit worried by this. Does this make sense to others?"

"I would consider any data valuable when it can be utilized for predictive analytics or to build a case for trends. Do you know what the issues are that would prompt their wanting to do away with historical records?"

"I agree with colleagues who've advised not to delete records, and I have a cautionary tale to reinforce that. Many, many years ago, an administrator here apparently made a similar decision to delete an entire group of records from the database. Fast forward to a couple of years ago, and we're forwarded a press release of a $5M gift to an out-of-state university, in which it says the donor is an alumnus of our university (the donor wasn't an alum of the university that got the gift, but it was in his home community). We can't find the alumnus in our alumni and donor database, and the hunt to answer the question of 'why didn't we know about this guy' leads to the discovery that the alum's record was deleted in that group years ago and that there are many other records we need to recover, as well. We've since tried to contact the alum and explain why he hadn't heard from us in 30 years, but, no surprise, he's been somewhat difficult to engage. For whatever reason that administrator many years ago made that decision, we'd never make the same one today. As others have said, data storage is cheap and reporting systems should allow you to deal with excluding individuals from mailings or solicitations if they've been inactive for a period of time, but if individuals aren't in the database, they're not being included in screenings for updated addresses, employment info, wealth events, etc., so removing records is a sure way to lose individuals who could be a donor in the future."

"We never remove records, but we continually update the coding of records (e.g., deceased; does not want to be contacted; do not email; etc.)"

"Rather than deleting the records you may want to consider coding those who have not had any action in 7 years as inactive or some other terminology that has meaning to your organization."

"I would hate for you to delete those records and lose all that data and institutional knowledge that you have been collecting along the way."

"You should not remove records, especially if there is any record of contact or giving in them, even if it is really old. You could mark them inactive, but some databases don't show inactive records when you do a regular lookup, which could lead to duplicate creation. The other problem with marking them inactive, is that sometimes they make contact or give a gift, but someone forgets to remove the inactive code and then they are excluded from queries and mailings, etc."

"I suggest managing them by implementing some way to exclude them from mailings, etc. (e.g., no contact or gifts in the last 7 years)."

"I'd be very hesitant to remove a record; maybe they could be marked as inactive or something similar? Are data-storage limits the concern?"

"In this day and age, storage is cheap and data is one of your most valuable tools. No sense in removing records...."

John

On Tue, Nov 8, 2022 at 5:26 PM John Taylor <johntaylorconsulting@gmail.com> wrote:

There are many strong voices for retaining all donor data permanently. However, as a matter of policy and standards, it's hard to find this definitive guidance black-on-white. Most document retention policies specify a 7- or 10-year retention term for donation records, for example. As data privacy becomes more of an issue, ideas are shifting about how long records should be retained. Notably, GDPR-compliant nonprofits typically embrace a standard of deleting or anonymizing records after 6 years of inactivity of any kind (not just ceasing donations, but ceasing subscription to emails, etc.) 

Retention of donor records presents tradeoffs in terms of donor privacy, data security risks, data storage costs, and issues of data integrity, and many organizations are reconsidering their approach to data retention. In determining which donor data you might best purge, it would help to understand which purposes your leadership is trying to achieve. With the goal in mind, you can craft a retention policy that honors those goals while protecting to the maximal extent possible advancement's operational capabilities.