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What to Do If a Patron Asks You to Delete Their Information: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1776918
Occasionally, you may have a patron ask you to delete their information. So what do you do when a patron requests this?
In this article, we'll walk you through what to do if a patron reaches out to you and asks you to delete their information.
What You Can Do
Depending on whether the patron has ever transacted with your organization, the actions you'll be able to take will be different.
The patron has Ticket Orders or Donations, but they're all in the past
If the patron has paid your organization, but all of their Ticket Orders and Donations are in the past, then you will need to anonymize their data in your system.
One way to do this is to remove any personal information from the patron's Account and Contact, such as address, email, phone, etc. You can also change the name on the Account and Contact to reflect that the information has been anonymized or redacted, such as changing it to "Anonymous Request" or "Anonymous Purchaser."
You could also reparent all of their Ticket Orders and Donations to one bulk anonymous Account and Contact by changing the Account and Contact associated with the orders and donations. This will disassociate the Ticket Orders and Donations from the patron's individual Contact and Account records, while still keeping record that the transactions happened. Then you can delete the patron's individual Account and Contact. While this is useful if you have a lot of patrons requesting you delete their information to prevent a large number of "Anonymous" Contacts and Accounts, it is a lot more work for you and your team.
For auditing purposes, transactions cannot be deleted, so if the patron has ever transacted with you, you won't be able to just delete their Account and Contact. This is because the related Ticket Orders and Donations have transaction information that must be linked.
The patron has Ticket Orders or Donations, and some are in the future
If the patron has paid your organization, and they have Ticket Orders for events in the future or Donations to be paid in the future, such as Pledge Payments or Recurring Donation installments, then you should check with the patron first.
This is because anonymizing their information will make it difficult to validate their tickets or to process their donation transactions. We recommend waiting until the event has passed or the donations are fully paid before anonymizing the patron's information in this case.
In these cases, reassuring your patron of your PCI compliance is also advised to help patrons rest assured that their data is protected with you, even if you will be anonymizing their data later.
You can read more about PCI compliance with Leap Merchant Services here.
For auditing purposes, transactions cannot be deleted, so if the patron has ever transacted with you, you won't be able to just delete their Account and Contact. This is because the related Ticket Orders and Donations have transaction information that must be linked.
The patron has no Ticket Orders or Donations
If the patron has never transacted with your organization, meaning they have never paid you and have no Ticket Orders or Donations, then you can simply delete their Contact and Account using the Delete action.
The patron has a PatronPortal User
If the patron also has a PatronPortal User, you will also need to anonymize their Portal User.
To do this, you'll first need to deactivate their user, since once it's anonymous, then patron won't be able to log in anymore.
Then, on the PatronPortal User in Setup, you can edit the patron's user to remove their personal information. For example, you can change their User's Name to "Anonymous User" and enter a fake Email that follows the format to a real one, such as "[email protected]"