Custom notifications are your own watch rules. Instead of only using the built-in events, you tell CoolFocus exactly what to watch for — "let me know whenever a gift over $5,000 comes in," "alert me when a new volunteer signs up from our website" — and it notifies you when something matches. This is the most powerful part of the notification system.
A custom notification is separate from the built-in system events: you create it, name it, and turn it on or off whenever you like.
1. Open your profile menu (avatar in the sidebar), choose Your notifications, and create a new custom notification.
2. Choose what to watch — the type of record (contributions, pledges, people, volunteers, appointments, requests, and more).
3. Add your conditions — the rules that decide when it fires (see below). Leave conditions off to be notified about every record of that type.
4. Pick your channels — In-App, Email, SMS. When you turn on SMS, CoolFocus shows a reminder that each text uses your organization's texting number and counts toward texting usage on your invoice, on top of your plan, and that SMS will not send until texting is set up for your organization.
5. Pick the frequency — real-time, or a daily/weekly digest. See Timing & Digests.
6. Name it so you recognize it later (for example, "Major gifts — over $5k").
7. Test it and save (see Testing, below).
Conditions are how you narrow a rule to exactly what you care about. Each condition is a field, an operator, and a value — and you can combine several. Supported operators include equals, does not equal, greater than, less than, contains, starts with, and is any of.
What you can filter on depends on the record type. For example:
• Contributions: amount, deductible amount, fund, donor, tender type, in-kind, refunded
• Pledges: amount, balance, fund, donor, active
• People / Volunteers: is a donor, is a client, is a volunteer, source
• Appointments: appointment type, center, resource, status, booked via
• Requests: request type, request status
• Major gifts: watch Contributions where Amount is greater than 5000 → email, real-time
• Building fund gifts: watch Contributions where Fund is Building Fund → in-app
• New web volunteers: watch People where Is Volunteer is true and Source is Website → daily digest
• Large open pledges: watch Pledges where Balance is greater than 1000 and Active is true → weekly digest
Use Test on a custom notification to have CoolFocus find a sample matching record, run your conditions against it, and send you a sample notification. It is the quickest way to confirm your rule fires the way you expect before you depend on it.
• Toggle on/off — pause a rule without deleting it
• Edit — adjust conditions, channels, or frequency any time
• Delete — remove a rule you no longer need
Your custom notifications are personal to you.
Both use conditions, but they start from different places:
• The filter (funnel) on a system event narrows an existing built-in event (see Choosing What You're Notified About).
• A custom notification is a brand-new rule you create from scratch and name — use it when no built-in event fits, or when you want a clearly labeled, standalone alert.
• Choosing What You're Notified About
• Notification Channels
• Notification Timing & Digests
• Finding Records with Filters — the same condition idea, applied to lists
