Removing Contact Records in Bulk
We understand that there may be times that you want to bulk remove a series of contact records from Donor Management. However, if you want to remove a bunch of contact records at once, you will need to contact our Support Team to aid in that process.
While you can’t remove a group of contact records on your own, there are a few steps you can take to make that process go quickly and smoothly.
Determine who to keep and who to remove.
It may seem like a simple question, but sometimes the best way to determine what contacts to keep isn’t as simple as asking “who has never given us any money?”
You may want to consider not only who has not given, but also who has never attended an event. Because Donor Management doesn’t consider tickets or sponsorships as donations, reviewing those contacts who haven’t attended an event can also help streamline which contacts you may want to keep.
Additionally, you should think about which of your contacts do – or don’t - engage with your organization. Reviewing who hasn’t made donations or attended events is a good start – but some of those folks who fall within that category still might engage with your nonprofit by volunteering, or sharing your communications on their social media.
Create a filter and group to isolate the contacts you are removing.
While we haven’t covered filters quite yet, we do want to point out that creating a filter may be the easiest way to segment out those contacts you’re looking to remove.
We recommend creating a custom filter under the “Contacts” tab that looks similar to the one below:
This filter includes the following conditions:
Total donation amount (lifetime) > equals > 0 : this condition will pull any contacts in that have no donation records associated to their profile
Number of tickets purchased > equals > 0 : this condition will pull any contacts that have never bought tickets for an event
Opened email blast (custom date range = 1 year) > is false : this condition will pull any contacts that have not opened any emails that you’ve sent through Donor Management.
These three conditions used together in a singular filter should help you better review which contacts aren’t donating, attending, or engaging with your organization.
Once you’ve created the filter, you can add all of the resulting contact records to a new group, which you’ll want to title “TO BE DELETED.”
Once that group has been created, you can contact our Support Team and they’ll be able to remove all of the contacts in that new group from Donor Management permanently!
One additional note: we recommend exporting a copy of the contact records you’re planning on deleting and saving it within your own records as a backup.