What happens to a user's data when they leave a university / company?

@Goldie Adding on to @JulieT's response, be cautious that if the brand administrator transfer surveys, other things like the contact lists and messages don't necessarily transfer over. It might be better to move ownership of those messages and contacts to a group if turnover is an issue.

@lillianc That is a great point, it's important to transfer library / contact data to a group as much as possible when working in a collaborative setting.

I'm pretty sure that we might have it set up where the user account gets deleted via Qualtrics api as part of the leaving process. Does Qualtrics have a white paper on best practices for this?

@Goldie Here at MSU, we don't delete any user data. Our use of SSO ensures they can't access our license, but their data remains. Because so many of our faculty and staff use their data for research, deleting it could be catastrophic for a research program if that researcher is just switching universities. When they get to their new place, they can request Qualtrics transfer their data to their new license.

I know academia is a little different than "the real world" but the idea of deleting data is scary to me.

We have the account marked locked for sometime and after while they are marked to delete.

Hi Linda,

How do you go about this? Is it automated in some way?

We’re looking at single sign-on but want to delete student and staff account when they leave the university.

Regards,
Richard.

At Boston College, we have had faculty and students who experienced a lot of heartache migrating Qualtrics accounts to and from our university to other universities. Sometimes it took over a month and occasionally Qualtrics misplaced data in the process. That said, we strongly recommend to our research community members that they "own" (take responsibility for) their critical data by exporting both the qsf files and the data...especially for data and surveys that they will quickly need to access when they leave or arrive at Boston College. Furthermore, there is an Institutional Review Board/research integrity issue. Once a faculty member has left Boston College, I need to obtain permission from their department before I migrate their entire account. If they have already made their own portable copies of critical surveys and data, then I don't have to do this. That said, once critical surveys and data are backed up, it does sometimes make sense to work with Qualtrics (Corporate) and the person's new/old university Qualtrics administrator to migrate their respective accounts.

We wanted to provide some clarity into the User Moves process. Before you decide to initiate a move, you will need to be aware of the fact that there will be some information / data that won't be able to be moved between accounts. We recommend checking out this page for more details.

> @AnthonyR said:
> @lillianc That is a great point, it's important to transfer library / contact data to a group as much as possible when working in a collaborative setting.

Hi AnthonyR,
How do you accomplish that? transfer ownership to groups Account? We love this idea, but I'm new to the Qualtric and would appreciate if you can direct me how to.

Thanks,
Abdi Jibril

For contacts, the drop down menu for the contact list allows you to "Move List" to the group.
https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/contacts/managing-multiple-lists/#ListOptions

For libraries, you can go into the "gear" settings of individual items and copy to the group library, but you'd have to change the reference to the group-owned library for everyone to see it.