Deleting supporters from your account

If you have unwanted supporter data in your account, follow these simple steps to delete the data.

Remember that deleting supporters cannot be undone!

Note that as the data controller, you (the client) is responsible for deleting supporters from your account.

What happens when a supporter is deleted?

When this process runs, any personally identifiable attributes or details regarding the supporters are completely removed from Engaging Networks. What remains in the system is log data that is associated with the supporter’s numeric ID.

This ID is retained and then used to clean up and remove all the orphaned log data that is older than six months.

As the numeric ID is the only data that remains for a supporter after data is deleted it is not personally identifiable as it can’t be linked back to any other information.

We retain the log data for at least a period of six months so that financial records, in the case of transactions, can be reconciled. After the six month period, all log data for the removed supporters is eligible for deletion.

What about widgets and recurring transactions?

Display widgets will not be able to de-duplicate against deleted supporters. Therefore, if you are reporting on unique participations, it will count a supporter again if they were previously deleted and take action subsequently.

Deleting supporters will stop any recurring transactions they have from continuing to process 

How do I delete supporters?

1) First, a warning

This is an irreversible process. We cannot “rollback” deletions. Please be absolutely sure you wish to delete the supporters and their transactions

If you decide to delete supporter data you’ll also remove the supporter’s association with any campaign (i.e. their transactions) including recurring transactions, and any question they have answered including opt-ins. So if you see a drop in action numbers in supporter export then this is why. If you wish to keep this data you need to export each campaign and question, not just their user data. The visual reporting or display widgets will not change their numbers. Please be completely sure that you want to delete the data before continuing

2) Prepare the deletion file

If you are happy to delete supporters, you need to first prepare a spreadsheet for deletion.

It is recommended to delete 100,000 supporters or less at a time

You must delete more than one supporter, otherwise your file will not upload correctly. If you wish to only delete one supporter, use the Lookup Supporter tool (under Data & Reports).

3) Run the deletion process

Once you have prepared your spreadsheet and then uploaded it in Data & reports > Delete, you will see something like this on the page:

When you are ready to delete these supporters, click on OK and the software will process your spreadsheet.

4) Check the deletion job

It will run as a job – you can see the status of the deletion in the job monitor. Once it is complete, you can download a summary file. If it was fully successful it will show “none” in the downloaded file:

All supporters were successfully deleted except the following which were not found:

none

If any email addresses weren’t deleted, you’ll see them listed in this file. Generally this means that the software couldn’t find these addresses to delete or they were incorrectly formatted. If this is case, note them down, tidy them up in a new spreadsheet, and try the process again.