Identify and empower a staff member to update Contact information. Encourage those who aren't likely to use the database to inform your heavy staff members of changes in marital status, living situations, births, death, and so on. While it is easy enough to show people how to update these things, sometimes it's okay to tell people to just email something to a key person.

• Require two searches before adding a new person (name, phone, address).
• Require at least one or both parents before adding a child.
• Require some current contact information (email, phone or address).
• Do not enter records when the spelling of a name is unclear and you can't rule out whether they are already in the system.
• Do not enter records without a last name by putting a ? as the last name.
• Some individuals feel like they absolutely must create a partial record to do their work. Show them how to use the Unassigned or Default Contact records as temporary placeholders. They can assign themselves or someone else a task to follow up on that record.

• Frequency: Weekly
• Method: Each time your church receives a donation or a registration, you can compare the information the individual submits online to the information on file for that person. To quickly compare information, launch the Contact Log Tool in the open record. You can also review the data for records that did not match a database record when you use the Assign Donor or Assign Participant tools.

• Encourage your volunteers in Check-In to complete a family's record and ask for additional information for new families or families that report a change on the weekend. You can use the Check-In system to change basic information like phone, address, and email.

• Frequency: Once per year
• Method: Send individuals an email from the Platform with a link to their user account on your website. You can even include their current data in the system using the Contact Fields in the New Message Tool. Ask them to either update their own information through your website or respond by email with the changes. Alternatively, create a selection of active Heads of Households who do not have an email address on file and send them a postcard asking them to either log in and provide one or return the postcard to the church with their email addresses.

• Frequency: Four times per year
• Method: Require that all ministries keep at least one Ministry Team Group Type current with those serving in their area.
  • Select all current Groups for a specific ministry and assign a task to a staff person in that ministry. That person who should review them and complete the task.
  • Use the Group Stats view on the Group's page to see when the last participant joined the Group. Ministries may abandon Groups that haven't had someone join recently.

• Define your categories (Non-participants, Member Participants, Attendee Participants).
• Establish with your leadership regarding how long each group of records can remain Active without any activity (new Groups, Events, Donations).
• Use the Review... views on the Participants page to determine how long since the person or their family participated in the church.

• The Inactivate Contacts Tool helps you to ensure that you fully inactivated Participants in all areas of the Platform.
• The Deceased Person Tool helps you to update all database objects related to the deceased person to avoid embarrassing emails or mailings with the decedent's name attached.
• The Combine Contacts Tool on the Contacts page ensures you fully combine duplicate records.

• Frequency: At least once per month
• Method: A system administrator or someone on the Data Quality Team should work through the Data Quality Views to fix records as needed. You can create additional Fix views on your own or with Support's help.