While most donor information can be controlled by donors themselves, Administrators have the ability to update donor profile information, as well as merge, join, or make donors inactive as needed.
In Giving, donor profiles are created in two ways:
In either case, if the person already exists in your Planning Center People database, Giving will use their name and email address to match the donor with that existing profile.
Tip
To avoid duplicates for donors with nicknames, enter the person's nickname as the First Name. For example, if you have a donor named Robert with the nickname Bob, enter Robert as the Given Name and Bob as the First Name.
From a donor's profile, you can:
View and update donor information and manually add a donation.
Add a pledge for a campaign.
Get information on the donor's recurring donations and donation history.
Notice
Donors can also change many of these things for themselves from their donor profile in Church Center.
Duplicate donor profiles can sometimes be created when people give online for the first time, use a different email address than usual when donating, or misspell their name or email address. Merging the two profiles will bring all of the donor's information into a single, combined profile.
Important
You need at least Manager level permissions in Planning Center People to merge people's profiles.
In a profile that has a potential duplicate, the Actions menu will have a warning label. To merge duplicate profiles, click Review in People from the Actions menu.
When you merge two known duplicates in Planning Center People, all past information for that person is combined. This has important implications for every application in Planning Center.
For Giving, here is what gets combined:
Donation history
Recurring donations
Payment methods (cards and bank accounts)
Phone numbers using Text2Give
Contact information (which could impact where their donation receipts are sent)
If a donor has moved, died, or otherwise left your church, you can't erase their previous donations. However, you can make the donor inactive in Planning Center People.
To make a donor inactive:
Go to the person's profile in Giving.
Click the Actions menu and select Delete profile.
Mark the donor as Inactive in People.
After a donor is made inactive:
Inactive donors are issued Donor Statements for any year in which they have given donations.
If a person who was inactive makes a donation or has a recurring donation go through, they will be made active again in Planning Center People.
Notice
Inactive profiles are treated differently in every product.
For example, when you create lists in Planning Center People, inactive profiles are excluded by default. If they were a member of any groups in Planning Center Groups, marking someone as inactive will remove them from any active groups.
Danger
Wait! It's likely that what you really want to do is mark a donor as inactive. Please read the Removing Donors section above.
It might make sense to permanently delete a donor profile if you created a test profile and you no longer need it. In this case, it's best to refund any test transactions and then delete the profile in People.
After a profile is deleted, if there are any remaining donations from that donor in your Giving database, they'll be marked with (Deleted).