“the contact has disappeared”

Ever have data just “go missing” for no apparent reason?

Here’s a question I got this week via email (shared with permission):

I am running a year end donation report and noticed that one of our donation contacts is no longer showing up in civi. It seems like it was there on a report that was run on 9/2/2024, but now the contact has completely disappeared out of civi along with all the donation history. The contact was entered as (OCF),Anonymous. Do you have any insight as to why this might have happened?

Thank you,
Fiona

It’s not a terribly uncommon question, so I thought I’d share my reply with you:

Hi Fiona,

Hard to say without taking a deeper look at your data (and even then, it may be hard to know with certainty), but here are some ideas:

• With a name like "(OCF),Anonymous", it seems possible that one of your staff may have deleted the contact. It may still be in the Trash, which you can search by using the "Search in Trash" option in Advanced Search.

• Or, It could be that one of your staff changed the name to something else, either intentionally or inadvertently. If you know some specific contribution date/time and amount, you may be able to find that contribution, and thus learn what contact it's attached to, by using the Find Contributions search.

• Finally, if all your searching proves fruitless, it would seem that someone deleted the contact completely (even out of the Trash), and it will be essentially impossible to find a record of who did that and when -- unless you happened to have CiviCRM's logging option enabled (which I don't think you do). This Logging feature does a good job of capturing every single change in the database, who made it, and when, although it requires some technical skill to be able to extract all of the necessary information for any given "who did that?" question. I wrote about it recently in my Daily Mailings list, in the post, “I didn’t edit that”.

By the way, this is not a terribly uncommon situation in any CRM, considering there are any number of staff who might be making changes at a given organization.

- A.

Looks like I wasn’t far off the mark. Fiona wrote back to say they’d found the contact in the Trash. A staff member had indeed deleted it, “as she thought they were malicious accounts because they did not have a contact email or address attached to them.”

With contacts restored now from the Trash, life is good, Fiona says.

What this means for you:

1. Training staff can be a gradual process. Proceeding with grace is as valuable as proceeding with care.

2. Sometimes contacts look surprising or “suspicious,” but it might be worth looking closely before deciding to delete them.

3. If “what happened to my data?” is a common question in your work — and you can’t seem to get answers — you might consider turning on CiviCRM’s logging features for a while, to get a better idea what’s happening.

All the best,
A.