How to Update Your Records When Someone Dies
Whenever an individual dies you need to update your records in a few ways to account for it. This will ensure they are no longer included in any mailings or mistaken as a current client in any way.
Add the Date of Passing as an Important Date to the Individual.
Date of Passing is an Important Date. Add it to the record of the deceased person.
Change the Status of the Contact to Deceased.
Setting their Status to Deceased will help ensure they are not accidentally included in future mailings or activities.
Set the Contact’s Status to Deceased. If all members of their Household are also deceased, change the Household’s Status to Ex-Client or Other as appropriate.
Change their Role in their Household to None.
Removing their Role in the Household disables some automatic functions from treating them as if they were still alive. The most common one being merge fields that look at a head of household or their spouse.
Change their Household’s Dear and Addressee field to exclude them.
If their name is part of their Household’s Addressee or Dear fields, remove them so mailings aren’t addressed to them.
Remove their name from the Household greeting.
Remove their name from the Household Addressee field.
Change their profile image to the halo image.
Having a visual cue that someone is deceased is helpful in avoiding social missteps. This procedure will show you how to add a halo to a deceased Household or Contact in order to provide this visual cue.
If their whole Household is deceased, set their Service Level to None.
Change the Household’s Service Level to None if all members of the Household are deceased.
Set them to Inactive.
Setting their records to Inactive will further help prevent them from appearing on any lists you might use, or any automated processes.
Set their Contact record to Inactive. If their Household only has deceased members, set it to Inactive as well.
Examine and deal with any Open Activities and Opportunities they are part of.
- Go to the Activities tab in their Household record.
- Go to the All Items tab and turn on “Show Activities from Children.”
- Set the Status Filter to “Status not equals Cancelled, Completed.”
- Examine each Open Activity and adjust it as needed based on the deceased person not participating in it.
- Go to the Opportunities tab of their record and do the same thing there.
Related Articles
How to Navigate in Gorilla 5
The Home Workspace 1. Workspace name, 2. Tabs, 3. Navigator, 4. main window, 5. Quick-Add button, 6. Shortcut Panel Tabs Each workspace has a different set of tabs. On the Home workspace, for example, the tabs include: SUMMARY—provides a brief ...Exporting entity data records
You can export records from the table on the Contacts workspace. The export runs against either a single record, or against all of the search results in the data table, regardless of which record is selected. To export data for a single entity: Click ...How to Add a Halo to Deceased Contacts or Households
Having a visual cue that someone is deceased is helpful in avoiding social missteps. This procedure will show you how to add a halo to a deceased Household or Contact in order to provide this visual cue. Note: Mark a Household deceased only when all ...Gorilla 4 to Gorilla 5 Field Comparisons
The purpose of this document is to go into detail on the differences between G4 and G5, from the perspective of someone migrating to G5. People The basic unit of people in G4 was the Contact Group or CG. A CG had individuals assigned to it, and an ...Viewing service requests in the data table
The Service Requests workspace and the Service Requests tab on the Contacts workspace display a data table that shows the service request records. You can search for and filter service request records, you can add new service requests, and manage ...