How Do I Separate a Contact Record?

There are times where you find out that an individual needs to no longer be a part of an existing contact record in Virtuous. This may be because you've found out the individuals need to receive their receipts separately or maybe a couple has separated. Regardless of the reason, we'll show you how to separate individuals and things to consider.

Where Does the Data Live?

Before we can talk about moving data, you need to throughly understand where the data lives. Check out this article for a quick overview of the data that lives at the contact or individual level. Anything that lives at the contact level cannot be easily moved to another contact record. Anything at the individual level will move with the individual to the new record.

Separating The Contact

Before you can remove an individual from a contact record, you must first create a new contact for this individual. When creating the new contact, you will be required to create an individual. This individual will be temporary since you will be moving someone to this record so the name is not important at this time;  contact name will be adjusted after the individual has been moved.

Once you've created the new contact record, you're ready to move the individual from the old record to the new one. Navigate to the old record and edit the individual. Then in the top left of the editing window, select the edit button in the Parent Contact Box. Next, select the contact that you created in the last step and click save.

Give it a few moments and your individual will show up on the new contact record. You can now go to the new record and delete the placeholder individual and add any data that you need.

Things to Consider

Depending on the situation, you may need to make some additional decisions for your organization, here are some things to consider:

• If the reason you need to move an individual is because they are a business owner who donates from both their business and their household, it's incredibly important to not duplicate the individual. We generally recommend that the individual lives in their household and you use a placeholder individual (First name: Friend, Last Name: of {your organization name}) for the business. This is because an individual can have relationships with many different organizations in your database and you don't want to have their giving accidentally associated with the wrong contact or for them to get multiples of communications.
• When a couple needs to be separated in the database, the reason for the separation may play into what happens:
  • In the case of divorce:
    • Is one individual in the contact the primary individual you interact with? That individual is likely the one that you want to keep with the original contact record
    • Does the giving capacity remain approximately the same? If not, it may be a good idea to create a new contact record for each individual.
  • In cases of needing a separate record for giving purposes:
    • Should one individual receive a passthrough credit on the giving of the other individual? If so, you may want to make an important note on each of the records to help make it known in gift entry that this should be taking place on every gift.
    • A relationship between the individuals should be established to create a connection between the two records.
    • You may want to consider a tag to indicate one of the records is a duplicate for direct mail efforts.
• Any notes that exist on a contact record will not be moved. If any need to be moved, you will need to copy the content of the existing note and create a new note on the new contact record.
• Giving will not move to the new record- any historical gifts that will need to be attributed to the new Contact will need to be refunded from the old record and added manually