GivebearPeople and outreach
Run the donor CRM in Givebear: contacts, lists, tasks, activity, and email campaigns.
The People area is Givebear's donor CRM. Use it to keep one record per person, group people into lists, track follow-up work, log what happened, and send email campaigns to the right audience.
Everything lives under People CRM in the dashboard sidebar. Inside it you find:
- Overview for what needs you today.
- Contacts, Tasks, Lists, and Activity for day-to-day work.
- Email campaigns for outbound email to a chosen audience.
- Messages and Text campaigns when text messaging is enabled.
- Volunteers when the Volunteer Program add-on is on.
Working in the CRM needs the donor "view" permission. Anyone with it can add and edit contacts, tags, tasks, and activity. Deleting contacts, deleting tags, deleting notes, and merging duplicates need donor "update". Importing donation history is owner or admin only. Email campaigns have their own permissions. See settings, roles, and billing.
Start on the People overview
Open People CRM to land on the overview. It pulls work to the top so you do not have to hunt for it.
- Needs attention lists overdue tasks, lapsed donors, and contacts missing an email or phone.
- The stat row shows total contacts, open follow-ups, active donors, and recurring givers.
- Follow-up queue, People to reconnect with, and Recent activity each link to the full view.
Each card is a shortcut. Click a contact to open their profile, or a stat to open a pre-filtered contact list.
Add and import contacts
A contact is the central record for a donor, registrant, member, or community member. Contacts are created automatically from donations, event registrations, and memberships. You can also add them yourself.
On the People CRM overview or the Contacts page, choose how to add people:
- Add contact to create one record by hand.
- Import to upload a CSV and map its columns to contact fields.
- Import donations to bring in past giving and create or match contacts. This is admin only.
For a single contact, fill in name, email, phone, and address. Only the fields you have are required.
For a CSV, map each column, review the preview, then confirm the import. Mapping an "SMS opt-in (yes/no)" column asks you to confirm those people agreed to receive texts.
Use Export to download your contacts as a CSV at any time.
Contacts are plan-limited. On the free plan, new contacts and CSV imports stop once you hit the limit, and contacts over the limit become view-only and cannot be emailed. Review your plan on the pricing page or in billing.
Work inside a contact profile
Open any contact to manage their full history in one place. From a profile you can:
- See gifts, recurring subscriptions, and saved payment methods.
- Record a gift logged outside Stripe.
- Add tags and free-text notes.
- Log activity and create follow-up tasks.
- View or download the contact's giving statement.
- Read and reply to their text conversation, when texting is enabled.
- Edit details or merge duplicate records.
For more on gifts, refunds, and payouts, see donations and finance. For donor-facing receipts and recurring gifts, see receipts and recurring gifts.
Filter and find people
On the Contacts page, search by name or email, then narrow with filters.
- Tap a preset chip (Recurring, Lapsed, or New) for an everyday cohort.
- Open More filters to add dimensions: gift count, lifetime value, last gift, subscription status, date added, membership, missing email, and missing phone.
- Select rows to tag or export them in bulk.
When a filter set is useful again, select Save these filters as a smart list. The saved rule becomes a segment.
Group people with tags and lists
The Lists page holds both ways to group people on one screen.
A smart list, also called a segment, is a saved filter rule. It updates itself as your data changes, so the membership is always current.
Givebear seeds built-in smart lists for every org: Major donors, Recurring, Lapsed, New contacts, Never given, Missing email, and Missing phone. Create your own with New smart list, save one from the contacts filters, or describe one in plain English with Create with AI.
Use a smart list when the audience should be derived from data, such as recent donors or recurring givers. Full details in segments.
Both smart lists and tags can be used as an email or text campaign audience.
Track follow-up with tasks
Tasks are the work waiting on a person. Open Tasks to manage them across the whole org.
Create a task from a contact profile or the Tasks page. Give it a clear title and an owner.
Set a due date so it surfaces in the follow-up queue and the overdue list.
Assign it to a team member. Filter by overdue to clear the most urgent first.
Mark a task complete when it is done, or reopen it if it needs more work.
Log activity
Activity is the timeline of what already happened with a person. Log it from a contact profile, or browse the org-wide log under Activity.
Each entry has a type and a short subject. Pick a type: call, meeting, in-person, email, SMS, letter, or note. Recent activity also appears on the People overview.
Use activity for history ("Called about year-end gift") and tasks for the next step ("Send the statement Friday").
Send an email campaign
Email campaigns send to an audience you choose. Drafts are safe to edit; sending happens once you confirm, either immediately or at a time you schedule.
Open Email campaigns and select New email campaign. Givebear creates the draft the moment you click and opens the editor. You can also start a draft from a segment card on the Lists page or from an event.
Enter a Campaign Name (internal, for your list) and a Subject Line.
Write the Email Content in the rich text editor, or describe the email in the AI Assistant box and select Generate to get a first draft of the subject and body.
Personalize with variables from the editor toolbar. #name inserts the recipient's first name (or "there" if unknown), and #donate links to your donation page.
Pick the Audience. Combine sources such as all donors, donors by fund or campaign, all contacts, a segment, tags, specific contacts, or event registrants. Givebear unions the sources and removes duplicate emails. The Estimated reach box shows how many people will receive the campaign and, when some of them have unsubscribed, how many will be skipped.
Select Save Draft, or Send Now and then Confirm Send in the dialog, which shows the recipient count.
Schedule a send
To send later, save the draft and open the campaign's Overview tab. Select Schedule, pick a date and time in Send at, and select Schedule send. The campaign's status becomes Scheduled and it goes out within about a minute of that time.
A scheduled campaign shows a banner with Cancel schedule (it becomes a draft again, which you can edit) and Send now.
Track results
The Email campaigns list shows each campaign's status (Draft, Scheduled, Sending, Sent, or Failed), recipient count, and delivery, with stats for campaigns sent, people reached, and delivery rate across all time. Open a campaign to see recipients, sent, and failed counts and a preview of the email as sent.
Sending requires your organization to have finished setup. Email campaigns are also plan-limited per month, with overage billed beyond the included amount, and view-only contacts over your plan limit are skipped. Check the pricing page for current limits.
Unsubscribes
Every campaign ends with a footer that names your organization and links to an unsubscribe page. It also carries one-click unsubscribe headers, which mail apps such as Gmail use for their own Unsubscribe button. Either path takes effect immediately.
- An unsubscribed address is skipped on every later campaign from your organization. The audience preview shows how many are being skipped, and a send is refused when everyone in the audience has unsubscribed.
- Unsubscribing applies to your organization's campaigns only. Receipts and other transactional emails still arrive, and other organizations are unaffected.
- You cannot re-subscribe an address from the dashboard.
To email event registrants, you can also start an invite, reminder, or follow-up draft from an event. See events and community and tickets, forms, and registrations.
Keep contacts clean
Good outreach starts with usable records.
- Confirm names and emails are correct before a send.
- Merge obvious duplicates from a contact profile.
- Keep tags few and meaningful.
- Fill in missing emails and phones flagged on the overview.
Where to next
Segments
Saved filter rules, the built-in ones, and how to email or text them.
Text messaging
Two-way texting and text campaigns from your own number.
Getting started
Set up your organization and dashboard basics.
Donations and finance
Gifts, refunds, statements, and payouts.
Events and community
Registrations that feed contacts and email audiences.
Settings, roles, and billing
Control who can view and manage contacts and campaigns.
Add-ons reference
Optional features you can enable for your org.
Fundraising guide
Plan campaigns and funds your outreach can point to.