Cleanup by deletion

Should you delete old CRM contacs?

If your CRM has been around for a while, you might have considered it.

Lots of folks have strong opinions:

• “Deleting is permanent, and you may be losing something valuable. Never delete!”

• “Maintaining data you don't need is costly and wasteful. Delete them!”

If you already have strong feelings about it, congratulations.
You know what to do.

For the rest of us, there are considerations:

• Does your CRM have tiered pricing based on total number of contacts?
  That's a financial expense, with no easy workaround.

• Are you constantly struggling to eliminate truly inactive contacts from your workflows?
  That's a mental expense, but there are ways around it.

• Is a contact you haven't heard from in 20 years worth keeping? 10 years? 2 years?
  The cut-off is usually not obvious.

So:

If you must keep your total contact count below X thousand,
you may need to delete some.

If you're confident that contact records with no activity in the last X years
can't possibly contain useful information,
you could delete some.

But for other cases,
it's probably worth putting some thought into classifying them
into one or more levels of activity/inactivity.

If you can do that,
most CRMs offer tools to help you mark them as such (CiviCRM does).

Once you work that out,
you can get the inactive ones out of the way without having to agonize over deleting them.

All the best,
A.