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Question

Improving "Deceased" Functionality

  • June 2, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 62 views
L
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When I find out that one of our donors is deceased, I mark as deceased then manually check the boxes for “Do Not Email/Call/Mail.” I really appreciate that marking someone deceased triggers a pop-up asking me to update their FHH salutations. Is there a way to set up another trigger so that everyone marked deceased is automatically marked “Do Not [contact method]”? 

When pulling most reports, we’re filtering out people who are deceased anyway, but it’s a nice failsafe to have as backup. Not a major need, but it would be nice to have!

P.S. If the answer is to create an automation… yeah, we’ve been thinking about it already. :) 

    3 replies

    rachel moody
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    • rachel moody
    • Community Manager
    • June 4, 2026

    Hi Lark! I shared this comment with some Bonterra staff to see if anyone had another workaround outside of building an automation because that was my first thought haha. Curious to see what other customers do as well. 

    Rachel at Bonterra
      J
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      • jeff
      • Product Pro
      • June 23, 2026

      Piggy-backing on this one about deceased constituents - 

      Do email addresses for deceased automatically get unsubscribed? If not, do those email addresses still count toward tier thresholds?

      How are others handling this - Do you just have an automation set up to unsubscribe deceased? I know it’s a standard suppression when targeting eblasts and pulling mailing lists so it’s not something we’ve paid attention to previously. 

        torvic vardamis
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        Hi ​@jeff 

        I can confirm that Email addresses aren’t updated once deceased has been applied to a contact record. There’s a few reasons behind that but the one that’s the most important to highlight is that Email addresses aren’t unique to contact records. 

        That being said, like you mentioned, deceased records are suppressed by default in searches unless they are updated. I can also confirm that these email addresses are counted dowards your overall thresholds. 

        I would recommed creating a business practice of reviewing Email’s that are associated with deceased records in some sort of cadence. You could create a Saved Search of deceased records only and use that in the Email Address Status report, and then unsubscribe/not subscribe them. 

        I hope this helps. Thanks!

        Torvic

         

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