Contacts & Connections
This is the basic record type for any person, organization, or household in CharityEngine.
What is a Contact?
Any person, household, or organization that gives a monetary gift to PHP earns this title.
What is a Donor?
This is a broad category that covers specific engagement (messaging) plans for reaching out to contacts, such as end-of-year messaging or an awareness campaign. These can have multiple messages or other creative pieces delivered to your contacts.
What is a Campaign?
This "first-party controlled" occurrence like a fundraising event, a gala dinner, or a PHP volunteer activity.
What is an Event?
These tools are a quick and dynamic way to sort your contacts into segments using a hierarchy like when you have a yearly event and want to assign the specific year they attended.
What is a Tag?
This term covers ALL form completions in CharityEngine, not just donations, but event registrations and surveys too.
What is a transaction?
This is the individual deployment of a specific creative (ad) such as a single email, an ad banner, or a series of phone calls (like re-enrollment!).
What is an Initiative?
This record is created the moment someone completes an event's sign-up process and claims a ticket.
What is Registration?
This more "stagnant" way to sort contacts includes examples like Board, Staff, or Major Donors.
What is a Group?
This code identifies all gifts/donations that were entered together as a set.
What is a Batch?
Build this saved, reusable list of contacts once, using a query, so you don't have to reselect people every time you send something.
What is a Smart List?
This tool builds a filtered list of contacts based on criteria you set. It's the engine behind Smart Lists and mass actions.
What are Queries?
Log a phone call, meeting, or other interaction with a contact using this feature that can even sync to Outlook!
What is an Activity?
Unlike a Sustainer, this type of recurring gift commitment is typically paid offline, not automatically online.
What is a Pledge?
These traditional newsletter-style lists let contacts subscribe and unsubscribe at will through the User Center portal.
What are Opt-In Lists?
Use this to access this filtering and reporting tool.
What is the Report Builder?
This tab allows you to create and track connections such as Person-to-Person, Person-to-Organization, and Organization-to-Organization.
What are Relationships?
Commonly (and a little confusingly) used to mean "a recurring donor," this term technically refers to the record that controls payment amount, frequency, and collections.
What is a Sustainer?
Think of this as a "bucket". It's how donations get restricted to things like Annual Giving or Capital Projects.
What is a Fund?
This is a configured view (just for you) is made up of multiple reports. You can use this to easily see any reports, events, or campaigns needed for your role.
What is a Dashboard?