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# When contacts die

When a contact dies, whether that contact is a donor or a staff member, there are several steps that need to be performed. Many of them are done automatically by DonorWise when a contact is marked as deceased.

If there is no surviving spouse

The contact should be marked as “deceased” on the <Personal Info> tab.

This will cause the address (and all address information such as phone and email) to become “undeliverable” when the record is saved. Nothing more needs to be done.

If there is a surviving spouse

Because the process for married couples is bit more complex, there is a menu item for this task.

Menu Path: Contact | Manage Deceased Spouse

Indicate which person is deceased and which person is the survivor. You must check a box for each or you will receive an error message.

The process will do the following:

1.Mark the contact as deceased.

2.Mark the address as undeliverable.

3.Create a note on the “deceased” record to indicate which person died and the new contact ID for the survivor.

4.Create a new contact ID for the surviving spouse.

5.Redirect the Donor ID to the survivor's Donor ID (if any).

If the contact was also a staff member, the following actions will occur:

•Remove the Contact from being a Ministry director on the ministry tree (if applicable)

•Make the new contact ID a designation and redirect the previous designation to it.

There are two other issues related to when a staff member dies:

1.Remember to update the name of the Responsibility Centre to the name of the surviving spouse. This must be done manually.

2.The receipt will not show a redirection reason when the redirection is due to a death. This would be an insensitive way for a donor to learn of the staff member’s home-going.

## Undoing a deceased contact

In the event that a contact is incorrectly marked as deceased, the above steps can be reversed, but those actions must all be done manually. If the new Contact IDs created by DonorWise do not have donations posted to them, the new contact(s) can simply be deleted. If they have donations posted to them, they must be redirected back to the correct and active Contact ID.