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Purging Contacts

As part of general database maintenance, your affiliate may need to purge contact records that are no longer active and show no reason to expect future activity.

It is important to remember that contact records in Keystone are connected to various other functions in the program including Donations, Volunteer Skills, and so forth. Although a contact may no longer be active, there may be past activity that should be retained.

When you purge a contact, you remove all active contact information; but Keystone will keep any donations, volunteer activity, and covenant partner contributions in historical records that can be included in reports.

You must be logged in as the Administrator or have Administrator-level privileges in order to purge contacts.

Historical records have a contact name that begins with zzz History with a suffix that indicates the type of record, for example: DN - Individual (Donor Individual), which would make the full name of this example zzz History DN - Individual.

The historical contact records are protected from being merged, purged, modified, or deleted.

Before you purge any contacts
  1. Make a backup copy of your database.
  2. Review your database to determine which contacts you wish to purge.

    Make sure you review the Tentative Purge List report (available on the Reports screen at Contact Management > Quality Management > Tentative Purge List) with other staff members for agreement. Remember, once you purge a contact, it is permanently erased.
  3. If you haven’t already done so, log in to Keystone as the Administrator or as a user with Administrator-level privileges.
    The Purge function is not available to users who do not have Administrator privileges. If you see the Purge check box on your Contacts screen, you have Administrator privileges.

There are two ways to purge a contact.

Both are described below.

To purge an individual contact by name

You can mark as many contacts for purging as you want and then purge them all at the same time. You do not have to purge contacts one at a time.

  1. Open the Contacts, Covenant Partners, Donors, or Volunteers screen, and select the contact from the Name drop-down list.

    2. Larger affiliates may have different staff members suggest which contacts in their area of responsibility should be purged.

  2. Check the Purge check box at the bottom of the screen.
    Some contacts cannot be purged if they are connected to other information. These contacts include:
  3. If you want to purge another record, select another name from the Name field and check the Purge check box for them as well.
  4. Repeat step 3 for additional contacts as needed.
  5. Review the Tentative Purge List report (available on the Reports screen at Contact Management > Quality Management > Tentative Purge List) with other staff members to ensure that no one will be deleted that should not be.
  6. Open the Contacts tab in the Keystone ribbon and click Purge Contacts (in the Database Maintenance group).
    You now see the contact names you marked for purging entered in the fields below.
  7. If you decide not to purge particular contacts, uncheck the Include box next to their names.
  8. When you are ready to purge the selected contacts (all contacts with a check in the Include box), click the Purge button.
    You will see a dialog box indicating how many contacts are marked for deletion.
  9. Click OK.
    The selected contacts are deleted.
To purge by Last Modified Date

You can also purge contacts based on their Last Activity Date (or Last Modified Date), which indicates the last time an action was performed on a specific contact. Your affiliate may decide that you wish to purge all contacts that have had no activity in the past year, past two years, etc. This helps you regularly purge unproductive contacts. This keeps your database clean, improves its speed and efficiency, and lets you focus on the contacts of greatest benefit to your mission.

  1. Open the Contacts tab in the Keystone ribbon and click Purge Contacts (in the Database Maintenance group).
  2. Click the Last Modified Date button, enter the date, and press Enter.
    You will see a list of the contacts that were last modified before your selected date.

    3. Records prior to, but not including, the Last Modified Date will be selected for purge review.

  3. Select the contacts you want to purge.
    All contacts whose Include check box next to their name is checked will be purged.
  4. Review the Tentative Purge List report (available on the Reports screen at Contact Management > Quality Management > Tentative Purge List) with other staff members to ensure that no one will be deleted that should not be.
  5. Click the Purge button.
    You now see a dialog box indicating how many contacts are marked for deletion.
  6. Click OK.
    The selected contacts are deleted.
After you finish purging records

Once you have purged the contacts from your database, you need to run the ScanDb utility to clean up residual information about the purged contacts that may still be in your database.

Running ScanDb does not remove any historical information related to the purged contacts. That information is preserved. ScanDb simply tidies up and verifies your database.

  1. Open the Tools tab in the Keystone ribbon and click ScanDb.
  2. Click the Start Scan button.
    You will likely see many errors after running ScanDb the first time.
  3. Once the scan runs through one time, disregard any errors you see and click the Start Scan button again.
    After the second time through, the database should be error-free. If you see any errors, view the report and correct the errors manually.
About your preserved historical information

Although the contact names and related information have now been deleted, the amounts and dates of the donations and hours records for these purged contacts are still preserved as statistical data under a generic 'contact' record identified as zzz History. No information that associates those donations or hours with the original contacts remains in the database once those contacts are purged. This allows you to still look at, for example, monthly revenue from donations in past years even if you purged some of those donors from your database.

Once they are purged, when you look at the detail of specific donations or hours for these records, you will see the date along with the donation amount or number of hours worked, but no name will be associated with it.

History records are created for Donor donations, Covenant Partner contributions, and Volunteer hours. In the Donor and Covenant Partner categories, individual history record names will be created for each type of Category 2 history that is saved. 

For example: zzz History DN - Individuals: this record will include information regarding donations given by contacts that were in the Donors/Individuals category before their Donor record was purged. Similarly, you will see other categories (e.g. Churches, Foundations, etc. instead of Individuals) for historical records that fall within those categories. This ensures that any Donor reports created by donor category include the appropriate historical information.

The above example is similar to what you will see for Covenant Partner and Volunteer historical records.

It is very important that you not delete these historical records. Although they appear throughout Keystone in category and selection lists, be sure that you do not delete records beginning with zzz History. If you wish to remove historical records from your database, please contact Keystone Support for detailed instructions. Removing these records incorrectly could corrupt your database.