Donor Deletion Scenarios
Some examples of when it might be appropriate to actually delete a Donor record.
We do not recommend using the delete option on the Donors page to delete Donor records. By default, this function is not shown through any security role. The topics below cover situations where you may need to safely eliminate a Donor record without any potential loss of historical donation data.
Scenario 1: A donor has died and you need to transfer donations to the surviving spouse.
- Open the Contact record of the deceased person.
- Click and run the tool.
Scenario 2: A Donor record was manually edited and assigned to a Contact record, resulting in multiple Donor records pointing to one contact.
This scenario may result when a new person does not understand the correct way to combine duplicate contacts or to re-assign (transfer) donations.
- Review the audit log of the affected Donor record(s).
- Identify a record that was incorrectly edited in this manner.
- Click Edit.
- Change the Contact record back to what it was.
- Click Save.
Scenario 3: A user clicked Copy on a Donor record, and you need to remove the duplicate.
There is a nightly data quality routine that looks for this scenario. When it finds this type of record, the Contact record will be duplicated, the additional Donor record associated with new record will be created, and a "Duplicate of" relationship will be added to tie the records together. After this routine runs, you can use the Combine Contacts Tool to remove the duplicate.
- Wait for the nightly data quality routine to run.
- From the Contacts page, open the Contact record in question.
- Click .
- The contact displays in two columns. You should see the differences in the donor information.
- Decide which column to keep.
- Click Merge.
- If the person chose to copy the donations when they copied the Donor record, find the empty donations on the Donations page using the Empty Donations view, then use the delete tool to carefully remove ONLY those empty donations.
Scenario 4: Someone or something created a duplicate Donor record.
On occasion, an application or a person may create a new Donor record and assign it to a contact that already has a Donor record. This results in one contact having two Donor records. While this situation has no urgent consequences, you should resolve it. Perform enough research to ensure this is in fact what has happened. Then, handle this situation in the same manner as removing a copied duplicate.