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Regular Maintenances - Do you have any to add?

  • October 15, 2025
  • 9 replies
  • 682 views
Andria
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Hi All! At my org we have a list of daily, weekly and monthly maintenances that we do in EA. I have shared this with a few other EA admins, and thought we could share together here! I would LOVE to hear what other kind of maintenance your org is doing (both one off and on a regular basis!) and see if I can pick up any other good habits 🙂 

 

I’ll start with a list of some of ours: 

Daily: Duplicate management

Weekly: Review custom calculated fields (they break from time to time), Check for missing OSCs, Review Targeted email meta data for accuracy (campaign, naming convention, etc),  Check for paused automations. 

Monthly: Review and update expired/failed scheduled reports with staff, audit revenue streams on source codes for accuracy, check for newly released user permissions, email subscription change/preferred update (when an unsubbed email is marked preferred, but there is a subscribed email on record - we swap that). 

Quarterly/Annually: Clean up saved lists and reports with staff, annual record reduction, database audit (provide metrics, year over year numbers, strategy insights to senior staff on DB heath and numbers not always communicated in dept/team metric reviews), Source Code organization (ensure SCs are saved under the proper parents). 

 

Please feel free to ask questions and please do share other things you all do!

Thanks!

      9 replies

      Dalila
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      • Dalila
      • First Timer
      • October 15, 2025

      Question, when someone unsubscribed but you do not have a secondary email, how does your org deal with these contacts on EA? Do you delete them? Do you keep them for a certain amount of time and delete later? 

        L
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        • Lark Valente
        • First Timer
        • October 16, 2025

        These are great! While it’s not as regular, we also like to occasionally check the pinned notes - are some of them no longer relevant? Are there some that spark an idea for further contact or follow up? This would totally depend on how/how often you use pinned notes, but any sort of “special” feature is good to check. 

          Andria
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          • Andria
          • Author
          • First Timer
          • October 16, 2025

          Question, when someone unsubscribed but you do not have a secondary email, how does your org deal with these contacts on EA? Do you delete them? Do you keep them for a certain amount of time and delete later? 

          We do an annual record reduction that removes contacts with no activity after a certain time period, minus those with contributions or VIP supporters, etc. Typically if email was the ONLY thing on the record, and they unsubbed, they would be deleted after 365 days. One of our ‘keeper’ criteria is if they have opened an email in the past 365 days and they would not fall into that category after unsubscribing. 

            Dalila
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            • Dalila
            • First Timer
            • October 16, 2025

            Amazing! I love that way of doing it and will be trying to implement that with my team. Thank you!

              J
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              • jeff
              • First Timer
              • October 27, 2025

              These are great! While it’s not as regular, we also like to occasionally check the pinned notes - are some of them no longer relevant? Are there some that spark an idea for further contact or follow up? This would totally depend on how/how often you use pinned notes, but any sort of “special” feature is good to check. 

              Hi Lark, what do you most frequently use pinned notes for? 

              what kind of notes are others pinning?

                Sally Heaven
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                • Sally Heaven
                • First Timer
                • October 28, 2025

                Question, when someone unsubscribed but you do not have a secondary email, how does your org deal with these contacts on EA? Do you delete them? Do you keep them for a certain amount of time and delete later? 

                I like ​@Andria’s recommendation for that specific use case.

                For records for which you don’t have a secondary email but do have other information like address, contribution history, and so on, it might be worth trying to retarget those people to get them to engage with you via another channel: SMS, social media, etc. Direct mail if you do that too.

                I think for the biggest bang for your buck, SMS is a channel I would invest in after email, and then various social channels. This blog post from Sea Change Strategies is a real eye-opener about social media platform usage in the 65+ demographic.

                  J

                  Here are a few of our periodic maintenance items:

                  • Run weekly EA/Excel process to correct capitalization issues in donor names before we send TY letters
                  • Run periodic Addresses Report for donors and archive old, incorrect, or duplicative addresses
                  • Run weekly search to catch records with no origin source code and apply correct codes
                    Liz Ragland
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                    • Liz Ragland
                    • Community Manager
                    • November 20, 2025

                    Here are a few of our periodic maintenance items:

                    • Run weekly EA/Excel process to correct capitalization issues in donor names before we send TY letters
                    • Run periodic Addresses Report for donors and archive old, incorrect, or duplicative addresses
                    • Run weekly search to catch records with no origin source code and apply correct codes

                    Jamie I love the idea of fixing capitalization issues. I had never thought of that before! Wondering how many you find are not the correct upper/lower case and do you know why they come in like this? Is it someone filling out a form and not pushing shift so their first and last name start with an uppercase letter? :) 
                     

                    Liz at Bonterra
                      J

                      Here are a few of our periodic maintenance items:

                      • Run weekly EA/Excel process to correct capitalization issues in donor names before we send TY letters
                      • Run periodic Addresses Report for donors and archive old, incorrect, or duplicative addresses
                      • Run weekly search to catch records with no origin source code and apply correct codes

                      Jamie I love the idea of fixing capitalization issues. I had never thought of that before! Wondering how many you find are not the correct upper/lower case and do you know why they come in like this? Is it someone filling out a form and not pushing shift so their first and last name start with an uppercase letter? :) 
                       

                      Hi Liz--Yes, they come in when a constituent fills out a form and enters their name as either all lowercase or all uppercase. We want to fix those before we generate letters to mail, and we generally have 20-30 per week that have to be fixed. I came up with a process using Excel and bulk-upload that makes it fairly quick to fix the salutations and envelope names all in one fell swoop!

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