CRM basics

The CRM stores all your contacts. Its core idea is one person, one record: a supporter who donated, attended an event, and volunteered is a single contact, not three disconnected rows. Everything you do in OrganizeOS updates that one record.

Contacts

Open CRM in the workspace sidebar to see your contacts. Each contact record brings together their profile, activity history (events, donations, volunteering, messages), tags, and notes. Select a contact to see their full timeline and add a note or log an interaction.

Contacts are visible to the people who can open your staff workspace, not to members or volunteers; a volunteer sees only the contacts on a walk list assigned to them. Adding, changing and deleting contacts each need their own permission; see Contact permissions. In the mobile app, the Contacts view of an organization's People screen shows only for those team members, and the buttons to add, edit, note or tag a contact show only with the matching permission.

A contact record is organized into tabs — Activity, Tasks, Notes, Details, Relationships, Donations, and Events. The tab you are on is part of the page address, so refreshing keeps your place, the browser back button returns to the tab you came from, and a link you copy opens on the same tab for whoever you send it to.

A volunteer debrief task, which OrganizeOS gives an organizer after a volunteer works a shift, has Log debrief instead of a checkbox on the Tasks tab and in the CRM's task list: it is done by logging the call on its debrief page. See Volunteer debriefs.

When members' share links brought a contact in, the Details panel of their record shows Brought in by and those members' names, and a contact whose own share links brought people in shows how many, such as Brought in 3 people. See the referrals report.

Deleting and restoring contacts

To delete one contact, open their record and choose Delete contact from the three-dot More actions menu at the top. To delete several, tick them in the contact list and use Delete in the bar above the table. Deleting needs the Delete contacts permission; without it the options do not appear.

A deleted contact disappears at once from your contact list, segments, campaigns and counts, and from the names on walk lists, and stops receiving your emails, texts and automations. For 30 days you can bring it back: choose Recently deleted at the top of the contact list, then Restore next to the contact. It comes back with its tags, notes, tasks and history. Opening a deleted contact's old link also offers Restore. After 30 days the contact is removed for good; Delete now in Recently deleted removes it sooner.

A contact who is an active member of your organization cannot be deleted. Remove them from your organization in People first. When some of a selection cannot be deleted, the message says how many were deleted and why the rest were not.

If someone you deleted comes back within the 30 days (they sign up, RSVP, sign a petition, check in, rejoin your organization, or arrive again from a connected integration) their contact is restored rather than created twice. Adding a contact with the same email offers to restore the deleted one instead, and an import shows how many deleted contacts it will restore. A restore by your team, by an import or by an integration sync counts toward your contact limit.

When a contact is removed for good, the record of what happened stays in your reports without the person: event attendance, email and text statistics, canvass results and activity counts. Their details, notes, tasks, tags and segment memberships are removed. Unsubscribes and other opt-outs are always kept, so a person who opted out stays opted out if they are added again.

Every delete, restore and removal is recorded in your organization's audit log.

Engagement score

Every contact has an engagement score from 0 to 100, shown on their record and in the contact list, where you can sort and filter by it. The score is recalculated every night from what the contact has done with your organization over the past year: events attended, volunteer shifts and hours, doors knocked and calls made, donations, petitions signed, conversations with your canvassers and callers, replies to your texts, email opens and clicks, and calls or meetings your team logged.

Recent activity counts the most. A contact who stops taking part drifts down over the following months, and one with no activity in the past year scores 0. The score reflects only activity with your organization, never with any other organization on the platform.

Events attended and volunteer hours on the record are calculated from the same activity, at the same time.

Tags

Tags are flexible labels you attach to contacts, for example volunteer, major-donor, or ward-3. Use tags to mark anything you want to find or act on later. A contact can have many tags.

Open CRM → Tags to see every tag in your organization, which category it belongs to, and how many contacts carry it. Selecting a tag's contact count opens your contact list filtered to that tag. Anyone who can view contacts can browse this list; creating, renaming, and deleting tags requires the tag-management permission, and the create and edit controls only appear for organizers who have it.

Segments

Segments are saved filters: a live list of everyone who matches a set of conditions (for example, "donated in the last 90 days and lives in District 5"). Unlike a tag, a segment updates automatically as contacts change. Segments are how you target email and SMS campaigns.

Pipelines

Pipelines track contacts through stages, useful for volunteer recruitment, major donor cultivation, or any process with steps. Move a contact from stage to stage as their relationship with your organization progresses. The pipeline editor is a desktop tool.

If you replace the default stages with your own, new contacts from signup forms, imports, RSVPs, and the mobile app start in your first stage, and the stage ladder on the CRM dashboard shows your stages with their counts.

The pipeline board loads a fixed number of contacts at a time rather than your whole database. Once your organization has more contacts than the board loads, a notice at the top of the page says exactly what you are looking at — for example, "Showing the 500 highest-engagement contacts of 3,200." The board always loads your most engaged contacts first, and the search and filter controls apply to the contacts on the board, not to everyone in your database. To work with a cohort that reaches beyond the board, build a segment or use the contact list, both of which cover every contact.

To bring existing contacts in from a spreadsheet, see Importing contacts.

Why this matters

Because every surface writes to the same record, your reporting and targeting are trustworthy. You can find your actual top supporters (the people who give, show up, and do the work) instead of guessing across separate tools.