Donor records, notes and tasks

Every person or organization who gives, or who you want to track, has a donor record. Online gifts create or match one automatically; you add the rest by hand or by import.

The Donors list

Donors → Donors lists everyone, with lifetime giving and the date of their last gift. Search by name, email, phone or external ID. Filter by Type (people or organizations), Tag, and Partner tier (any tier, a specific tier, or not a partner); sort by most recent gift, lifetime giving, name or newest record.

Add donor opens a blank record; Import a CSV takes you to the importer (see Import donors from a spreadsheet). Adding and editing donors needs the Staff, Admin or Owner role; everyone, including Read only, can open and read records.

What's on a record

• Donor type: person (first and last name) or organization (organization name). Email, phone and mailing address.
• External ID: the id from your previous system, used to match rows on import.
• Do not contact: when ticked, the donor gets no thank-you emails, statements or shipping notices. Tax receipts for gifts they make online are still sent, because they asked for them by giving.
• Tags, custom fields and household: see Tags, custom fields and households.
• Timeline: every gift, receipt, soft credit, note, task and tier change in date order, newest first.
• Recurring giving: their active plans, with a link to each.
• Year-end statements issued to them.
• Partner tier, when you run tiers: current tier, since when, and Pin to tier for staff (see Set up partner tiers).

Click Edit to change any field. The edit page also has Archive this donor, which hides the record from lists and search; their gifts stay in the ledger and in reports.

Notes

Notes are free text on the record: a call summary, a meeting, a preference ("prefers mail, no phone"). Pin a note to keep it at the top of the record under Pinned notes; unpin or delete it when it stops being useful. Notes appear in the timeline and are never shown to the donor.

Tasks

A task is a follow-up with an owner and a due date: "Call to say thanks for the gala gift", "Send pledge reminder". Create one from the donor's record (What needs doing?, optional details, Assign to a teammate, Due date) or from Donors → Tasks, which lists every task across donors with Open, Done and Assigned to me views. Overdue tasks are marked. Tick a task to complete it; reopen it from the Done view if needed.

Tasks don't send reminder emails; they're a shared list your team checks in the app.

Merging duplicates

DonorFinch matches online gifts to existing donors by email, and the importer matches by external ID, then email, then name plus address (see How imports avoid duplicates). If two records still end up for the same person, keep the one with the giving history, move anything you need by hand, and archive the other. There is no automatic merge yet.