Marking Contact Records as Deceased
Unfortunately, there are sometimes situations where a contact has passed away. It’s important in these instances to ensure that you aren’t continuing to send communications to them moving forward. You have a few options as to how to manage these types of contacts:
You can remove the ability to send them both email and physical mail communications.
You should be able to unsubscribe these contacts in the same way you’d complete an unsubscribe request; you can toggle the “Does this email address receive emails?” question to the gray “X” option.
You can also remove the contact record’s mailing address from the corresponding address fields to make sure no physical mail is sent to their address. (If you want to keep that physical address for your records, you can copy and paste the information into the contact record’s “Notes” field instead.)
You can track and manage deceased contacts through filters, custom fields, or groups.
You do have the option to track deceased contacts by modifying some of their contact records; this will make it easier for you to run a filter later on and exclude those contacts from your communications.
First, you can change a deceased contact’s first name to “deceased,” and place their full name in the “last name” field. This will make it easier for you to run a filter for anyone whose first name is now listed as “deceased”.
You can also create a “custom field” to indicate if a contact record is deceased and/or if they no longer wish to be contacted. (We’ll cover custom fields in a later module.)
You can remove deceased contacts from Donor Management entirely.
The final option you have is to delete a deceased contact entirely. We don’t recommend this option over the other two, because deleting a contact record requires you to delete any other information related to that record.
You’d need to delete their donation records, communication records, pledges, etc. before you’d be able to delete the contact record; additionally, removing that donation history can impact the overall integrity of your data within Donor Management, and may impact other aspects of your reporting.