How to stop your database filling up with one-off visitors

Every good thing you do creates records. Someone books onto a holiday club, registers at the check-in kiosk, or fills in a form, and a record appears. That is exactly what you want at the time, but a few years on the database can feel bloated with people who came once and were never seen again. The fix is in three parts: keep them separate as they arrive, review them regularly, and tidy up with confidence.

Keep new arrivals separate

1. Create a group for newcomers, and another for one-off guests. Making them independent groups stops those people flowing up into your main church database until you decide they belong there.
2. In the check-in settings, set the group that one-off guests are stored in. Anyone who ticks ‘I’m only here as a one-off visitor’ at the kiosk lands there rather than in with your regulars. See where check-in settings live.
3. Do the same thinking for events and forms. If a group of people are only ever coming to one thing, give that thing its own group.
4. Move people on deliberately. When a newcomer becomes a regular, add them to the groups they actually belong to. That decision is worth a human being making it.

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Review what has built up

1. Look at your newcomer and guest groups first. They are usually where most of the clutter is, and reviewing a group of forty is far less daunting than reviewing a database of twelve hundred.
2. Open a person’s record to see their history, including when they last logged in and their check-in and attendance records.
3. Use a query to pull out the groups and criteria you want to look at together, and choose the columns so the information you need to judge each person is on the screen at once.
4. Export the results to a spreadsheet if it is easier to work through with someone else. What you can do with query results covers the options.

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Tidy up

• The same person often exists twice, once from a booking and once from a registration. Merging duplicates usually removes more clutter than deleting ever does.
• Where a record genuinely serves no purpose, delete it. Under data protection you should not keep personal information you have no reason to hold, so this is good practice rather than just tidiness.
• If you would rather not lose the history, move the record into an archive group instead. Make that group independent so nothing in it counts as part of your church database.

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Good to know

• Attendance and check-in history sits on each person’s record and on group lists, which is ideal for pastoral care. There is not currently a report that lists everyone who has not attended in the last few weeks, so this is a review you work through rather than a button you press.
• Encourage people to keep their own details current instead of doing it for them. Anyone with a login can update their details and consents themselves, and the app makes that easy.
• Half an hour after each big event is worth more than a whole day once a year. The records are recent enough that someone still remembers who these people were.
• A record you are unsure about is not doing any harm sitting in a clearly named group. Guessing and deleting the wrong person is the outcome to avoid.