Donor Management

Track donors, gifts, pledges, and acknowledgments end-to-end — all inside your own CartonCrew, with no external provider needed. Donor profiles carry full giving history; gifts and pledges roll up into segments, reports, and year-end statements.

Who this is for: admins and fundraising staff in an org with the Donor Management extension enabled. (Activation is gated behind an attestation in Settings → Fundraising.) Members can read; editors and above can write.

What’s here

Everything lives under the single Donors item in the sidebar. Opening it shows four tabs across the top of the page:

Older bookmarks to the separate Gifts, Pledges, or Donor reports pages redirect automatically to the matching tab.

A Donate button on your public website is a separate, smaller extension, Donations (PayPal). It links to your PayPal page and records nothing here. See Donate button (PayPal).

Adding a donor

1. Open Donors and stay on the Donors tab.
2. Click + Add donor. (When you have no donors yet, the empty state offers the same + Add donor button.)
3. Fill in the Add donor form:
   • Display name (the only required field) — how this donor is listed and addressed.
   • Donor type, First name, Last name — optional.
   • Email, Phone, Address line 1, Address line 2, City, State, ZIP — optional. Phone is formatted as you type.
   • Primary contact and Contact email — for an organization or a household where the person you write to is not the donor name itself.
   • Consent captured via — how this donor’s contact consent was obtained.
   • Tags (comma-separated) and Notes — optional.
4. Save.

Saving without a display name is refused with “Display name is required.”

Recording a gift

1. Open the Gifts tab.
2. Click + Record gift.
3. The Record a gift window walks three numbered steps — 1. Donor, 2. Details, 3. Review:
   • Donor — search by name or email in Find donor and pick the donor.
   • Details — see below.
   • Review — check the summary, then click Save gift. Back returns you to Details.

The Details step

First choose the gift type with the Monetary / In-kind toggle. The rest of the form changes with it.

Monetary:

• Gift date
• Amount (USD)
• Payment method — choosing check reveals Check number
• Payment reference

In-kind:

• Gift date
• Description (required for an in-kind gift)
• Category, Quantity, Unit
• Donor-provided estimated value — not assigned by this organization. The wording is deliberate: your organization records what the donor stated, it does not appraise the item.

Both types then offer:

• Value of goods/services (USD) — when the donor received something in return, which affects the deductible portion on their receipt.
• Link to pledge — see Pledges, below.
• Donation type — pick from the list, or click + Add to create a new one inline (New donation type, then Add).
• Source — e.g. Spring appeal, website, gala.
• Matching company and Match amount (USD) — for an employer match.
• Notes.

Importing donations in bulk

On the Gifts tab, click Import to open Bulk import donations. Use Download template to get the expected columns. After a run the window reports how many rows Imported, how many Donors created, how many were Anonymous, and how many Failed; Import another starts a second file and Done closes the window.

Donations rung up in Square

A sale of a Square admin item whose kind is Donation (for example _Donations) is recorded as a gift automatically, with source Square. CartonCrew matches the Square customer to one of your donors by email, then by a phone number only one donor has. If there is no match it creates a new donor. A payment with no customer goes to the Anonymous donor. A refund in Square reduces the gift and adds a note to it. The Square guide (Donation items) has the detail.

Pledges

A pledge is a formal commitment to give. Create one, then record the money against it as it arrives.

Creating a pledge

1. Open the Pledges tab and click + New pledge.
2. The New pledge window asks you to pick the donor first. (Starting a pledge from a donor’s own profile instead skips this — that donor is already selected.)
3. Then fill in Pledge amount (USD), Pledge date, Due date, Installments, Frequency and Notes.
4. Save.

On the Pledges list, Donor is a filter box for finding existing pledges, not part of creating one.

How a pledge actually gets fulfilled

There is no control that marks a pledge fulfilled. Open the pledge and click Record payment — this opens the same Record a gift window, already attached to that donor and that pledge. The pledge’s received total and its status are then recalculated for you from the gifts linked to it.

That is enforced, not merely conventional: the API refuses to let staff write a pledge’s received amount or status at all. The one status a person can set directly is cancelled, via Mark cancelled.

A pledge’s Status shows as a chip and takes one of: active, partial, fulfilled, lapsed, cancelled. On the list, Status is a filter for finding pledges — it is not an editable field.

The other controls on a pledge are Send reminder now (emails the donor immediately, independent of the scheduled reminders) and Save notes.

Linking works from the gift side too: any gift’s Link to pledge field attaches it to an existing pledge. A pledge belonging to a different donor is rejected.

Acknowledgments and receipts

Acknowledgments are generated from a donor’s profile, not from a separate tab. Open the donor, then:

• For one gift — find the gift in the donor’s gift list and click Generate receipt. The Generate gift receipt window shows the Type, Date and Amount / item it will cover, and confirms “Your receipt is ready.” when done.
• For a whole year — in the Acknowledgments section, click Generate annual statement, choose the Fiscal year, and generate. These appear in the list as annual statements rather than single-gift receipts.

The donor’s gift list carries an Acknowledged column, so you can see at a glance what has already been receipted.

Year-end donor statements are also available as PDF packs through the PDF Reports extension (Source: Donor packs).

Reconciling

The donor profile offers Reconcile donor + volunteer for linking a donor record to the same person’s volunteer record, so their history is not split across two entries.