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A contact record is deliberately thinner than a member profile. It holds who the person is, how to reach them, where they came from, and whatever your organisation added on top through statuses, tags, custom fields and notes. It holds no login, no roles, no unit membership and no membership fee. Built for the person who has to keep the donor and subscriber list accurate. Replaces the columns you would otherwise invent in a spreadsheet. This page is the field-level reference. For what a contact is and how it differs from a member, start at Contacts. A contact record showing the contact information card with source and dates, the newsletter card, tags, the status pipeline, the payments card, e-documents and email logs

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Identity

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One name field, split on demand

There is no first-name and last-name pair on a contact. There is one Name field, and Orgo derives a first and last name from it by splitting on spaces whenever something needs them separately, taking the first word as the first name and the last word as the last name.
This is why imported names sometimes split oddly. “Maria del Carmen Ruiz” gives a first name of “Maria” and a last name of “Ruiz”; “Ruiz, Maria” gives a first name of “Ruiz,”. Nothing is lost, because the full string is what is stored and displayed, but anywhere a first name is used on its own (a personalised email greeting, for example) will show the split, not your intention. Fix it by editing the Name field into the order you want.
A contact created with an email address but no name is filed under the email address as its name. That happens on automatic capture paths such as a newsletter signup, so a list of contacts whose names look like email addresses usually means those records arrived without a name, not that anything went wrong.

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Social profiles

The record page shows these as icon links. With none of them filled in, the card reads “No social profiles added”.

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Address

There is no personal street address field on the contact form. The address you can record is the Company address in Billing Details below, which is what invoices use.
When a contact has no country of its own, the record and the list display the country of its town instead. The Country column in the list can therefore show a value that was never set on the record itself. Sorting and filtering by country read the stored field, so a contact showing a country by way of its town will not appear under that country in a filtered list.

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Organisation and role

Two blocks, filled in by hand. Professional Info
Current role is a job title, not a permission. Contacts have no permissions at all, and nothing you type here grants access to anything. If you want someone to be able to sign in, they need a member account. See Becoming a member.
Billing Details

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Provenance

Every contact carries a Source, set once when the record is created and never changed afterwards. It is shown as a coloured tag on the record and as a sortable column in the list. Contacts created by an import also keep a link back to that import, which is what lets an import be rolled back. What each source fills in is covered in Where contacts come from.

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Status and dates

The contact statuses settings screen listing the tenant defined statuses with their colours and drag handles for reordering

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Duplicate email addresses are possible

Email is not unique on a contact. There is no database constraint on it, not even within one organisation, so the same address can appear on two or more contact records at once. This is normal data cleaning, not an error state. Duplicates arise because only one path checks for them. The Add Contact form refuses an email that already belongs to a contact or a member, and offers to update the existing record instead. Every other path writes without that check:
  • Spreadsheet imports
  • Newsletter signups and embedded contact forms
  • Event registrations, donations and other checkouts
  • Records created by Stripe or by contract signing
A second reason is the name split described above: a nameless capture is filed under its email address, so the same person can end up once as “Ana Popescu” and once as “ana@example.com”. Clean them up with the merge tool, which finds duplicates by identical email address and by identical name, and folds one record into the other so the payments, tickets and documents on both end up on the record you keep. See Merging duplicates.
Deleting one of two duplicates is not the same as merging them. Deletion is refused while the contact has any payment, invoice or signed contract, and where it does go through it takes the record’s whole history with it. Merge first, delete second.

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Statuses

A contact status is a label you define, not a fixed list Orgo ships. Think of it as a pipeline stage: New lead, Contacted, Qualified, Lapsed, whatever your team actually says out loud. Each status has three properties:

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Defining the list

Settings → Modules → Contacts → Contact Statuses. Add rows, edit a name or colour in place, drag to reorder, and delete the ones you stop using. The list stays editable, so you can rename or reorder at any time. Deleting a status does not delete the contacts that held it; those records simply go back to having no status. Everywhere a status can be chosen, an organisation with none yet gets a “No statuses. Manage Statuses” link straight to this page.

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Setting a status on a contact

Two places, and both save immediately:
  • On the record page, click a chip in the status pipeline. A short toast confirms.
  • In the contacts list, click the status tag on a row and pick from the dropdown. This is the fastest way to work through a batch of contacts.
Statuses are gated by Enable Contact Statuses under Settings → Modules → Contacts. It is on by default. With it off, the status field, the status column and the status filter all disappear, and nothing is deleted. Contact statuses are a separate list from member statuses, which are fixed and decide whether someone can sign in. See User Statuses.

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Tags

Tags are the multi-choice counterpart to the single-choice status. One contact can carry as many as you like.
  • The tag catalogue is organisation-wide, and it is shared with members. The same tag can sit on a contact and on a member, so you can filter both populations by it.
  • Casing does not create duplicates. Orgo normalises each tag name and keeps one entry per organisation, so “Volunteer”, “volunteer” and ” Volunteer ” are the same tag, not three.
  • Assignment is per contact. Open the Tags card, type to search, and pick. The X on a chip removes it.
The two are separate. Someone with HR_TENANT can tag contacts all day using tags that already exist, but typing a name that is not in the catalogue yet and pressing Enter will be refused. Ask an organisation administrator to add the tag once, then everyone can use it.
Tags are also written automatically by workflows, which can add or remove a tag as an action, and each of those changes is recorded on the contact’s activity feed.

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Custom fields

Custom fields are how you record anything Orgo has no column for. They are defined once under Settings → Users & Profiles → Custom Fields and reused across members and contacts. Only profile fields attach to a contact. A custom field belongs to one of several groups depending on where it was created; the profile group is the one that reaches a person’s record. Fields built for a specific form stay on that form and never appear on a contact. There is one exception by design: the local center field type is form-only, because a contact already has a Chapter field of its own. Which profile fields appear on the contact form is decided by your profile form configuration, and the read-only Additional information card on the record only shows fields that actually have a value, so a contact with no answers has no card. Field types available: Input text, Input numeric, Textarea, Dropdown, Checkboxes, Radio choice, Switcher (True/False), Date and File Upload. Visibility levels: every field is Public, User or Admin, which controls who can read and write the value. Encryption: a small number of free-text fields per organisation can be encrypted at rest. The cap is five, and only Input text, Input numeric, Textarea and Date fields qualify. Choice, switch and file fields cannot be encrypted. All three of those are explained in full, with the exact rules on who can read what, on Custom Fields.

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Notes and activity

Two cards that work together. Notes is what your team writes about the contact: what was said on the call, what to do next. Each note records its author and the time, is capped at 512 characters, and can carry an optional Called or Emailed action. The author of a note can edit or delete it, and so can ADMIN_TENANT; nobody else can change someone else’s note. Activity is the feed underneath, merged newest first. It combines the notes with things Orgo records on its own. Donations and form submissions the contact made appear in the same feed, so the card reads as one running story rather than an audit dump.
Profile field edits are recorded but are not shown in the feed, which is deliberate: a record edited in ten fields would otherwise bury the notes. The entries exist for auditing, so ask an organisation administrator if you need to see them.
Who can write and read: HR_LOCAL or FINANCIAL_LOCAL over that contact, or ADMIN_TENANT.
Both cards sit behind Enable Profile Notes & Activity under Settings → Modules → Users & Profiles → Configuration, which is off until you switch it on and needs ADMIN_TENANT. Switching it back off hides the cards and closes the endpoints behind them, but deletes nothing: existing notes reappear with their authors and dates when it goes back on. Full detail: Profile Activity & Notes.

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The record page

Open a contact from the list and you get a modal; the maximise control and the /contacts/show/ URL give you the same content as a full page. There are no tabs. The record is one scrolling page of cards in two columns, which stack into a single column on a phone. Several cards hide themselves when they have nothing to show, so not every contact displays every card below. Left column, top to bottom:
  1. Contact info with the Edit button that turns the whole card into the form
  2. Status (on a phone only, so it stays near the top)
  3. Newsletter, with a single Subscribe or Unsubscribe button
  4. Social profiles
  5. Tags
  6. Notes
  7. Activity
  8. Additional information, the custom field answers
  9. Create user account and Delete contact buttons
Right column, top to bottom:
  1. Status, as a left-to-right pipeline of chips
  2. Events the contact registered for
  3. Payments & Subscriptions, with the subscription table above the payment list
  4. Company Membership, when the contact is on a company account
  5. e-Documents, when that module is on
  6. Email logs, every message Orgo sent to this address
On a phone the right column falls below the left one, and the Create user account and Delete buttons move into the menu at the top of the record.

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The contacts list

Contacts in the main menu. The list is where most day-to-day work happens.

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Columns

Name, Country, Town, Chapter, Email, Phone, Newsletter, Source, Status, Tags, Date created, Stripe.
  • Name, Country, Town, Newsletter, Source and Date created are sortable. The rest are not.
  • Email and Phone are icon-only to keep the row narrow. Hover to read the value, click to copy it.
  • Status is editable in place: click the tag and pick.
  • Tags are clickable, and clicking one filters the list by it.
  • Chapter appears only with Enable Per-Chapter Contacts on, Status only with Enable Contact Statuses on, and Stripe only on rows that have a Stripe customer.
One box, and it matches name and email. It runs when you press Enter or click the search button next to it, not as you type, so a long list does not re-query on every keystroke. The X clears it and returns you to the first page. On a phone the box is behind the search icon in the header.

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Filters

Four dropdowns, and they combine with each other and with the search. Counts on the Status and Newsletter dropdowns are fetched the first time you open them, so they are current rather than cached from page load.

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Paging and bulk actions

The list shows 20 rows per page and paginates on the server, so filters and sorting apply across your whole database, not just the page you are looking at. Select turns on the checkboxes. Once rows are ticked, one action is offered: delete selected. There is no bulk tag, no bulk status change and no bulk newsletter action, so those stay one contact at a time.
Bulk delete is the only bulk action, and it is not reversible. Contacts that cannot be deleted, because they have a successful payment against them, are skipped, and the confirmation tells you how many were skipped. Read that number: a batch that reports fewer deletions than you selected has left records behind on purpose.