Getting Started with CoolFocus

CoolFocus brings your organization's people, communication, care work, giving, events, and reporting into one system. The areas you see depend on what your organization uses and the permissions according to your User Group.

Your first steps

1. Logging In & Finding Your Way Around — sign in and learn the layout.

2. As an Administrator, access Settings to set your general Organizational Settings, as well as the Settings for all the modules your organization will use, such as Giving, Client Care (forms and documents, client portal), Scheduler (what affects the scheduling of your client appointments), Security Settings (what your team members have access to), and third-party Integrations.

3. Inviting Your Team — bring your staff into CoolFocus (only administrators have the ability to invite additional team members or users).

4. New to the words we use? Keep the CoolFocus Glossary handy.

Brief Home Screen Overview

View this brief video that introduces the CoolFocus home screen and provides an overview of each module:

Main areas (depending on your access permissions)

• Home: An overview of what is happening in your organization today. Includes interoffice announcements, tasks assigned to you, any charts awaiting sign-off, today’s appointments assigned to you, and other recent activity by your team members.

• Giving: manage donors, contributions, funds, recurring gifts, pledges, in-kind gifts, and fundraising efforts.

• CoolPay: manage online giving setup, donation forms, payment transactions, and payout reconciliation.

• Care: find and maintain client records, contact information, notes, tasks, and related history.

• Case Management: coordinate ongoing care, follow-up, goals, tasks, and history across multiple interactions.

• Visits: document the details of a specific appointment, service, class, test, ultrasound, or client encounter.

• Forms and Consents: fillable forms to retrieve client information, or consent documents that the client needs to accept or decline. These can be built according to your needs and sent electronically to the client.

• Charting: collects detailed visit information regarding the client

• Events: plan fundraising events, sponsorships, registrations, tables, seating, tickets, and event follow-up.

• Serve: manage contact information for your volunteers, record their service hours, and track their onboarding status or required documentation

• Scheduler: configure client appointment types, locations, resources, and online booking rules. Plus and Premium subscription levels include an online booking widget, booking links for third-party scheduler integrations, and the ability to send appointment reminder text messages

• Inbox & Client Portal: manage client conversations, texts, replies, assignments, and follow-up. The Secure texting option is for messages that include Private Health Information (PHI) to send the client a secured login to the client portal. The regular Text option is for general conversations that do not include PHI.

• Reports: review saved reports and analytics views across your data.

• Data Grid: the table view of any record type, where you can sort, filter, group, search, and choose which columns to show so the list fits the way you work.

• Segments: saved filters that group records by conditions you define (for example, active clients or lapsed donors), so you can reopen a focused list without rebuilding the filters each time.

• Love INC Community Assistance: track Love INC-style liaison assistance work such as requests, needs met, referrals, vouchers, gap ministries, and verifications. This model is based on national Love In The Name of Christ organizational standards.

• Contacts & Organizations: keep shared relationship records for people, households, churches, and organizations (follows the national Love INC model mentioned above).

• Settings (Admins only): access your overall organizational settings, update your CoolFocus billing information, access settings options for all modules you have access to, and view delete history.

When records overlap

Some records may appear in more than one context. For example, a person may be involved with your organization as a client, donor, volunteer, household member, or community-assistance neighbor. Start with the area that matches the work you are doing today, then you can easily switch to that person’s record in another involvement as needed.

Getting help

A Support launcher is available at the bottom right corner of every page in CoolFocus. Click it to open the support widget, where you can ask questions, report issues, or share feedback.