Contact Records and the Donor CRM

One Contacts list holds everyone your organization deals with — donors, vendors, members, grant funders. What makes a record "a donor" is simply having gifts attached; what makes it "a vendor" is being the payee on checks. Every contact record pulls its whole relationship together in one place: gifts, pledges, invoices-as-payee, membership, and notes.

Where: left menu, Contacts. Your plan sets a donor-record limit (Free: 100, Foundation: 500, Core: 2,500, Pro: unlimited). Only contacts flagged as donors count toward it; vendors, customers, and other non-donor contacts never use up the cap, and inactive contacts don't count either. The limit is enforced at the moment a contact becomes a donor: quick-creating a giver from the gift or invoice screens, or importing rows marked Donor = Yes.

The three names

Each contact has up to three names, and it matters which you fill in:

• First / Last Name — for people.
• Organization Name — for businesses, foundations, churches.
• Payee Name (required) — the name that prints on checks and financial reports. GoodBooks pre-fills it from the other two; override it when the legal payee differs ("Smith Family Trust").

Contacts also carry one mailing address, plus any number of emails and phones, each with a type and a primary flag. Every email row has a Receipts toggle — turn it off to stop gift receipts to that address without deleting it. (On Core and up, the Giving Envelope # field lives here too — see Using Giving Envelope Numbers.)

The tabs on a contact

Open any contact and the record is organized into tabs:

The Donor tab

For organizations with donor CRM (Foundation and up), this tab is the development director's view of the relationship:

• Giving tiles, computed live from actual gifts: Donor Since, this year's total, last year's total, lifetime (with gift count), last gift, and largest gift. Nothing to maintain — record gifts and the numbers are always current.
• The Lapsing alert. A donor who gave last year but nothing yet this year gets a yellow Lapsing flag — on this tab, on the tab itself, and as a badge on the Contacts list. Fundraisers call these LYBUNT donors (Last Year But Unfortunately Not This), and a personal touch now is the cheapest fundraising you'll ever do.
• Donor details: a Salutation ("Bob & Sue") for letters, an override for Donor Since, and Do not email / Do not mail preference flags — visible to your whole team so everyone honors the donor's wishes.
• Notes. A running feed — visit summaries, family connections, preferences. Notes can be pinned to the top; they can't be edited after the fact (delete and re-add to correct one), which keeps the record trustworthy. Everyone in your organization who can open contacts sees them, so write accordingly.

Keeping the list clean

• One contact per real-world person or organization. Online gifts are matched to contacts by email address — a donor who gives with a second email gets a second record, and there's no merge tool yet, so consistent emails matter more than usual.
• Someone moves on: inactivate the contact — they leave the payee pickers, exports, and your plan count, but their history stays. Delete is reserved for records created by mistake; a contact with gifts or transactions should always be inactivated instead.
• The Contacts export (Settings → Data Export) gives you the whole active list as a CSV — see Getting Your Data Out of GoodBooks.
• Bringing a list in works the other way: the Import button on the Contacts list takes a CSV or Excel file and skips anyone already on file — see Importing Contacts From a Spreadsheet.