Plain-language definitions of the words you'll see most often in CoolFocus. When a term shows up in another article, this is where to look it up.
People & records
Person (also called a Contact): the base record for an individual in CoolFocus. Everything about them, notes, tasks, gifts, visits, hours, lives on this one record.
Client, Donor, Volunteer, Staff: these are not separate people or separate records. They are involvement flags you turn on for a Person, showing how they're connected to your organization. Each Person record must have at least one involvement flag (Client, Donor, Volunteer, or Staff) assigned to it in order to be saved. "Person type" is another term sometimes used to describe these flags.
Client: receives services from your organization.
Donor: has given financially.
Volunteer: serves your organization. Their hours count in volunteer-hour reports.
Staff: a paid employee. Their hours are left out of volunteer-hour reports, even if they also volunteer.
One Person can hold several flags at once, for example someone who is both a Donor and a Volunteer. Turning on a flag never creates a new record, everything stays on that one Person's history. Their record header shows a chip for each flag they hold (Client, Donor, Volunteer, Staff), so you can jump straight to that view. See Contacts and Organizations and Staff & Volunteers. Additionally, a Person record cannot be saved unless at least one flag (Client, Donor, Volunteer, or Staff) is assigned.
Organization: a business, nonprofit, agency, or partner group you work with.
Church: a congregation or faith community you work with.
Household: related people who share a home or address. Each person belongs to one household, their primary home. See Households.
Role in Household: an optional label on a person's record describing how they relate to the rest of their household, such as Head, Spouse/Partner, or Child. It does not affect a client's services, eligibility, or permissions. See Household Member Roles.
Affiliation: a link between a person and an outside group, church, or partner organization they're connected to, such as a referring church or partner agency. A person can have more than one. See Affiliations on Donors, Clients, and Volunteers.
Relationship: a link between two records that shows how they're connected in real life, such as parent/child or spouse. Unlike a household, a relationship can connect records in different households, it's how you record a person tied to more than one home or family. See Relationships.
Record: any single item you open in CoolFocus (a contact, a donation, an appointment, a conversation, and so on).
Communication
Conversation: the working record of a back-and-forth communication with one person (text, secured message, or logged call). Lives in the Inbox.
Secured message: an encrypted message the contact reads and answers after logging in securely. Use it for communicating sensitive or private information.
Reply: a message sent to the contact through Inbox.
Internal note: a message on an Inbox conversation that is viewed by your team only; the contact never sees it.
Template: a reusable, fill-in-the-blank format for emails or letters.
Broadcast: one message sent to many contacts at once.
Giving
Contribution / Gift: a financial donation, one-time or recurring.
Recurring gift: a donation that repeats automatically on a schedule.
Pledge: a promise to give a certain amount, often over time.
Fund: where a donation is directed (General Fund, Building Fund, a specific program, and so on).
In-kind gift: a donation of goods or services rather than cash.
Grant: funding from a foundation or government source, usually with reporting requirements.
Services & care
Intake: the first step of gathering a client's information and needs.
Case: an ongoing client situation that involves multiple services or interactions over time.
Appointment: a scheduled time slot on the Scheduler, sometimes called a booking. An appointment is not a visit: when the client arrives and staff click Start Visit, CoolFocus creates the visit that records the care. See Appointments vs. Visits.
Visit: records what happened during a client's single appointment, service, class, or encounter with your organization.
Referral: directing a client to another organization or service.
Request: a need a client has asked for help with (Love INC / community assistance).
Finding & organizing data
Filter: a way to narrow a list to just the records you want. See Finding Records with Filters.
Segment: a filter you've saved and named so you (and your team) can reuse it. See Saving & Sharing Segments.
Report: an organized, often ranked view of your data for review or export.
System & access
Module / Area: a section of CoolFocus for one kind of work (Inbox, Giving, Scheduler, and so on). You only see the areas your organization uses or the areas your User Group has access to.
User: someone with a sign-in to CoolFocus, managed under Settings → Security → Users. Being a User is about login access, not about who someone is to your organization, it's separate from the Client, Donor, Volunteer, and Staff flags described above. A user's login can be linked to their Person record, so the same individual can be both a User (has a login) and, say, a Staff member (has that flag on their record).
User group: a set of permissions that decides what a type of user can see and do within CoolFocus.
Center: a system-wide location or site value used across CoolFocus.
Other words for the same thing
Organizations use different words for the same records. If you are used to one of the words on the right, this is what CoolFocus calls it.
Person / Contact: individual, constituent.
Donor: giver, supporter, contributor. Some organizations call recurring donors “partners.”
Client: guest, participant, patient, family served.
Church: partner church, congregation, affiliate church, member church. Love INC affiliates work with partner churches that refer or sponsor clients.
Contribution / Gift: donation, payment.
Recurring gift: recurring donation, recurring contribution, sustaining gift, monthly partner.
Fund: designation, project.
Household: family, family unit. Giving uses donor households and Love INC uses client households.
Appointment: booking. A visit is a separate care record, not another word for an appointment.
A word that means different things in different areas, such as “household,” depends on which part of CoolFocus you are working in.