Deleting a Contact

To delete a contact from Keystone, use Keystone’s Purge utility. At a basic level, this involves:

Marking the contact for purging on the Contacts, Covenant Partner, Donors, or Volunteers screens.
Printing the Tentative Purge List report (available on the Reports screen at Contact Management > Quality Management > Tentative Purge List) and reviewing it with other staff members for agreement.
Running Keystone’s Purge utility.

Purging a contact retains various historical information about that contact, such as donation history, but deletes their actual contact record.

Only the Administrator user or a user with Administrator privileges can mark a contact for purging or run the Purge utility. Users without these privileges will not see the utility or the Purge check box on the various contacts screens.

If you do not have Administrator privileges but want to suggest that a contact be purged, consider instituting a standard message to insert into the Notes field on the Contacts screen. For example, you could add PURGE to the Notes field of a contact you think should be merged. An Administrator can come back later and search for all records that contain PURGE in the Notes field and then mark them for purging.

Checking the Purge box on a contact’s record only puts the contact in the queue for purging. The record is unaffected until it is actually purged using the Purge utility. This gives you the opportunity to review the contacts marked for purging with other staff members to ensure no contact gets purged that is useful to someone else.

For more information about the Purge utility, see the Purging Contacts section.