What happens when I delete a contact from my engageSPARK organization?

At engageSPARK, we know and understand that our customers often deal with sensitive information concerning their program participants. We take data privacy very seriously, and we understand that when you delete a contact, you expect their PII (personally identifiable information) to be completely removed from our systems.

This article describes what happens to your contact’s information when a contact is deleted from your engageSPARK organization.

First, how is a contact deleted?

Deleting a contact is very simple. First go into your Contacts page. Select the contact or contacts you wish to delete. Press the Bulk Actions button and from the drop down menu select the Delete Contacts option. Another window will then pop up for confirmation. If yes, simply press the continue button and done! Contacts deleted.

What happens afterwards?

As an extra precaution, we wait 7 days to start the process of deleting the contact’s PII, giving you a chance to ask us to undelete any contacts. Seven days after a contact has been deleted from your organization, our system will:

• • Delete all PII (personally identifiable information) from the contact in our database. This includes their name, phone number, and all the custom field data you added for that contact like gender, age, address, etc.
  • Delete the connections between the contact and any group the contact had been added to.
  • Remove the contact’s phone number from any message-type transaction, i.e, any SMS, Voice, WhatsApp, or Airtime top up transaction.

Three pieces of non-PII  from the contact will remain in our system:

• • The contact’s engageSPARK generated contact ID.
  • The country the contact was from.
  • The customer’s engageSPARK generated Organization ID.

What about information related to message-type transactions?

All of the details of the message transaction will remain stored in our database except for the phone number of the contact that is normally stored with each transaction.

What will remain are:

• • The contact’s engageSPARK-generated contact ID
  • The country the contact was from who received the message from your campaign
  • The message details such as message content for SMS and Whatsapp, the time of the message/call, the cost of the transaction, and the value of the top up (in case of an airtime top-up).

In some cases, the message content could contain PII (e.g., if it says, “Hi Jane…”; you can always reach out to support to ask us to delete message content of certain deleted contacts by providing us with those contacts’ contact IDs.) We will also be adding a tool to the platform where you can check a box to also delete message content of any messages sent to or received from the contact you are deleting.

We are continuously looking for ways to make sure that our customers feel comfortable knowing that their information and that of their participants are in good hands. So, if you or your organization have any specific data privacy needs, let us know!