Thanks for the additional information emailed to me. I was aware of most of that functionality, but now I can see how to put it together better and test it and adjust it for my circumstances.
I’ll post your message here as others may find it useful.

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Based on your work flow description, if someone enters your data base and has a first name and last name set, you can switch them from a Person record to Organization record. This will move their first and last name to the one name field in an organization’s profile.

Switching them again from Organization to Person recreates the first name and last name, but all data will now be in the last name box.

Example would be if you had your profile First Name: Paul, Last name: Boundy. I switch you from Person to Organization. Now there is one name box that reads Paul Boundy. I switch you back from Organization to Person. Your profile now reads First name: blank, Last name: Paul Boundy.

Similarly, you can batch update a group of Person profiles to Organization. This will also move all names to the one name field in Organization which will the last name field in a Person profile.

For importing data, if you have a record you can put the name in the last name field. If you select sign_up_type = 1 (for Organization), you’ll create a new Organization profile with one name in the name box. Switching this profile from Organization to Person will leave the First Name field blank and populate the last name field.

This like what you’re already doing, but I wanted to provide a confirmation of your workflow and highlight that if you’re importing new records with the sign_up_id = 1, you can avoid filling in the first name but placing everything in the last name field.

Hi Paul,

While you can import records as Organizations using signup_type = 1 (signup_type = 0 would import a “person” record), there currently still is not a way to overwrite fields with blank data via import of batch functionality. I’m emailing you some more information regarding your current set up.

We have a small Nation with just a few mostly volunteer people using the nation.
We have individual members and organisational members.
For the Org members, to ease admin, we have decided to use the following naming practice:
First Name: Blank
Last Name: Contact Name — Org Name

As we already have some data in the First Name field, we would like to do an import or some bulk way of removing all the data in the first name field.
There does not appear to me a method to do this.

We have members sign up automatically to the Nation, but we also need to upload new members.
Also uploading data is one of the best way for us to do data maintenance, so I hope we can resolve this.

Our alternative is to use the following naming practice:
First Name: Contact Name —
Last Name: Org Name

But this means that if someone wants to manually edit the details the user needs to change the signup type / entity from and Org to a Person, save the record, edit the First name field, change the signup type back to Org and save it again. This step is likely to be too much trouble for our users.

So how do we do a build delete?

Having a similar problem. Trying to do a massive post-election data clean, and we have some things like phone numbers and , middle names that have been put as “0” or “.”, and other things.

In addition – we have some people who used to live in our area, and have since moved out, but have been involved in some other way. We want to keep these people’s email addresses or other history on our database, but to be able to in bulk remove their addresses based on electoral roll data.

Would like to be able to overwrite these with a blank field to improve the overall quality of our data.

Thanks, but this is the kind of thing that needs to be fixed. Some of these contacts have other phone numbers, and I don’t want to mark the entire contact as “Do Not Call”. I just want to batch remove the bad phone numbers.

Another option would be for you to implement a “Bad Number” flag for the Home and Work numbers, similar to the Mobile number. Then we could batch update that instead, which would be a reasonable workaround.