CRM Basics

Your CRM is where all supporter relationships live. It's automatically populated as people interact with your organization — when someone donates, buys a ticket, registers for an event, or is imported in a batch, their contact record is created or updated without any manual data entry.

Automatic record creation

You don't need to manually create contacts for online donors. When someone gives through a donation form, buys tickets, or registers for an event, CauseVox creates their contact record automatically with all the information they provided.

Contacts

Contacts are individual people — donors, volunteers, event attendees, and supporters. Each contact record is a complete picture of that person's relationship with your organization:

• Personal information — name, email, phone, address, and custom fields
• Complete giving history — every donation, ticket purchase, and pledge, with lifetime totals
• Event attendance — registrations and ticket orders
• Activity timeline — a chronological log of interactions, notes, and system events
• Tags and segments — flexible categorization for appeals, communication preferences, and more

See: Contacts

Households

Households group related contacts together — typically family members at the same address. This lets you:

• See combined household giving across all members
• Avoid duplicate mailings to the same address
• Understand family giving patterns over time
• Maintain a household-level address that stays in sync

See: Households

Organizations

Track corporate sponsors, foundation grants, and organizational donors. Link employee contacts to their parent organizations for matching gift tracking and relationship mapping.

See: Organizations

Keeping Your CRM Clean

A CRM is only as useful as its data quality. CauseVox gives you tools to keep records accurate:

• Duplicate detection — identify and merge duplicate contacts that may have been created from multiple transactions or imports
• Tags and custom fields — organize contacts with flexible, hierarchical tags for appeals, segments, and communication preferences. Add custom fields to capture data specific to your organization — member IDs, volunteer roles, board status, or anything else. Together, tags and custom fields let you shape the CRM around how your team actually works
• Imports — bring in contacts from spreadsheets with field mapping and duplicate matching, so existing records are updated rather than duplicated

See: Duplicates · Tags · Custom Fields · Importing