Cleaning Up Unexpected Contacts After Connecting an Integration

Overview

You can easily identify and remove a recently added set of contacts. These could have come in via import, or more commonly via a connected integration like Mailchimp or Constant Contact.

Linked Articles:

- Archive a Contact

- VIDEO: How to filter properly

- Trash Contacts

The Use Case

When connecting an integration that can bring in contacts, you can bring in more contacts than expected. This can lead to dirty data and also overage charges for your subscription plan if you do not remove the extra contacts before your billing period ends.

You do have ways you can connect a tool like Mailchimp and control what contacts come into Kindful, but with other integrations like Constant Contact, that same control is not possible, which can lead to this addition of unintended contacts.

How to Identify These Contacts

The most effective way to isolate these contacts is by using the Join Date After filter on the Contacts page. Use this filter to find any contact that were added to your Kindful account after a particular date. For example, if you connect Constant Contact on September 30, 2020, and after that you realize there are many additional contacts you did not intend to have in Kindful, you can filter "Join Date After: September 29, 2020" to get a list of these recently added contacts.

If more time has passed between your date of connection and the current date, you can also stack on the Join Date Before filter to the string in your filter bar to create an even more specific view. This can help to isolate new contacts to just those which were added by the integration connection. 

How To Remove These Contacts

Once you have filtered for these records, you have two options to remove these contacts. Once filtered for, use the √ Select All button from the right-hand sidebar and choose to either Archive or Trash the selected contacts (links to each of these processes above in the Overview section).

Our recommendation is to use the Archive feature for a handful of reasons:

• If a contact is Archived and then has another interaction with you (e.g. makes an online donation with the same email), it can be automatically un-archived
• For a record to be eligible to be Trashed, it must match multiple criteria; including not having any online transactions
• Archiving records, like Trashing them, will remove them from your Active contact count, and you will not be charged for them
• We recommend Trashing a contact when they were brought in unintentionally, and have no expected future interaction with your organization