Just by using PatronManager/Salesforce for a while, you're constantly accumulating data -- staff members are entering new records, patrons are buying or donating online, you probably imported records from your old system, etc. Cool! Data is good, right?
Well, not ALL data is good data. Maybe you're taking over from a predecessor at your organization but there was a while when there wasn't really anyone in the "gate keeper" role; maybe you had a lot of messy data in your old systems that didn't get addressed in the import process, and you need to do some cleanup now; maybe you're just noticing that your reports seems to include a lot of "cruft". There are some relatively simple steps you can take to clean things up and take out the trash.
First, decide what your "trash" is. This is probably going to be different for different organizations, but for us, there's at least one clear line to draw: do you have Contacts without actual contact information?
If you have no way of getting in touch with someone (by phone, by email, by postal mail… nothing), do they even really count as a Contact? First Name and Last Name are nice, but unless the person has the most obviously unique name in the world, you still have to be careful about "qualifying" that contact-less Contact to a possible dupe in the database (or the world), lest you end up creating a false history for them.
So here's what we'd do if we were feeling like "data hoarders" and needed to tidy things up a bit (spoiler alert: it's alllll about running reports):
1. Start by finding Contacts where Email and Phone and (any parts of) Mailing Address are all blank.
creating these took about 20 seconds
Then add a cross filter to see whether they've ever made donations or bought tickets (or any other interaction you track in your account). Maybe there's a piece of info on there to help you track them down? Or at least you'll know they're a real person in some way.
the most classic use case for cross filters
2. If they have no history? JUST DELETE THEM. They are un-contactable. You are never ever ever getting back together.
3. If they do have a history… well, you still can't contact them, right? We might consider re-parenting that history into an "anonymous" bucket account/contact because effectively, they are anonymous now.
4. From there, we might be done, but we might want to go a bit further, looking for people with an email address but no name, or that have a phone number but it's missing a digit (oops!), or that have parts of a mailing address but it's not complete... etc. Again, just figure out if there's any way to have a real relationship with those people if you try.
In the end, the whole point is to make sure that all of your Contacts are contact-able!
Who wouldn't we delete? We'll keep anyone that has real contact information, even if they're marked as opt-out or deceased or uninterested. That's good data! If you ever get data from another source, you don't want to accidentally re-import one of those "do not contact" folks without knowing you're not supposed to contact them.
Some of this clean-up will feel weird and bad because you're getting rid of people! But there is no benefit to keeping that data and there is no downside to getting rid of them. Be free!