Contacts and Organizations are shared relationship records. They help you keep one clean view of the people and groups connected to your organization.
Contacts: people connected to your organization, such as donors, volunteers, clients, staff contacts, or community partners.
Households: related people who share a household or address.
Organizations: businesses, nonprofits, agencies, and partner organizations.
Churches: congregations or faith communities you work with.
A person may participate in more than one way. For example, someone may be a donor, volunteer, and event guest. A shared contact record helps CoolFocus connect the right history without duplicating the person.
Opening an Organization record shows an Overview tab with a snapshot of that organization, followed by its recent activity:
Highlights: Organization Type, Partner Status (with a summary such as Full Partner or Agreement Signed, plus the Partner Since date), Roles, Primary Contact, and Email/Phone.
Pinned activity: notes, tasks, or other activity someone has pinned to the top of the record.
Open Tasks and Notes: the most recent open tasks and notes for the organization, side by side. You can add a note directly from this tab, the same as on any other record.
Recent activity: a preview of the latest activity logged on the organization record.
Any highlight field that is not filled in shows as a dash instead of a blank space.
Organization records have a Description field, a free-text field (up to 500 characters) for a short summary of the organization, such as what it does or how your team works with it. It appears on the organization's detail view and as a column in the Organizations grid, and is included in organization exports.
Search for a person or organization by name.
Review contact details and relationships.
Open related records, such as contributions, tasks, notes, requests, or event participation.
Keep addresses, phone numbers, and communication preferences current.
When you find duplicate contact records, use the Merge action in the record's actions dropdown to combine them into one. Merge is available on contacts and other mergeable record types.
Merge is not available on template records (email templates, document templates, and similar template types). Templates are managed and edited individually and do not support the merge workflow.
Contact records may include private contact or service information. Follow your organization's privacy policy before entering, viewing, exporting, or discussing sensitive details.
