Every person or organization in CoolFocus lives in one shared record type — a Contact. Involvement flags are what tell CoolFocus, and your team, which roles that Contact actually plays in your organization: Client, Donor, Volunteer, and Staff are the most common.
CoolFocus does not force you to create a separate "Client" record and a separate "Donor" record for the same person. Instead, one Contact can carry multiple involvement flags at once — someone can be both a client you serve and a donor who gives back, without duplicate records to keep in sync.
Involvement flags drive:
• Which record views and grid columns show up for that Contact (a Client sees intake/case fields; a Volunteer sees availability and positions).
• Which segments and reports the Contact appears in — a "Donors" segment only includes Contacts with the Donor flag set, for example.
• Which links resolve correctly elsewhere in the product (for example, dashboard task links route to the correct module — Clients, Connect, or Give — based on a Contact's involvement flags).
Open a Contact's record and look at the General Info tab. Involvement is shown as a set of toggles/badges (Client, Donor, Volunteer, Staff, and any module-specific ones your organization has enabled). Turning one on adds that role's fields and views to the record; turning it off hides them but does not delete any history already recorded under that role.
Can a Contact have more than one involvement flag? Yes — this is the normal case for many organizations (a volunteer who is also a donor, a client who becomes a volunteer, and so on).
A Contact isn't showing up in a segment or report I expected. Check that the relevant involvement flag is actually turned on for that Contact — segments and reports scoped to a role (Clients, Donors, Volunteers) only include Contacts with that flag set.
A record link from a dashboard task or activity feed goes to the wrong place. This usually means the Contact's involvement flags don't match where the link is trying to send you. Confirm the correct flag is set on the Contact record.
• Contacts and Organizations
• Staff & Volunteers
• Donors and Contributions
• Client Management Overview
