If you have unwanted supporter data in your account, follow these simple steps to delete the data.
Remember that deleting supporters cannot be undone
What happens when a supporter is deleted?
When a supporter is deleted, we remove the record from ‘log tables’ and place the ‘email address’ and ‘Campaigner ID’ in a secondary ‘deleted’ table which is not accessible from any account dashboard
Once the record is removed from the log tables, the connection with associated transactional details (e.g. date of action taken, name of action, target emails sent etc.) is no longer possible and this transactional detail cannot be exported in an account after supporter data is deleted.
The transaction detail does still exist in a secondary deleted table. We do not purge deleted campaigner log details for 180 days after the date of the initial deletion. We are required to keep this data as part of our Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance audits. You can not however query on any of this deleted data in your Engaging Networks client account.
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.