Getting started

What Fay is for

Fay is a gentle CRM for small organizations that gather an audience, a choir, a little theater, a community center. It has one job: to keep every guest, gift, ticket, and conversation about your organization in a single place, so the person who came to three concerts, gave twice, and once called about parking is one record instead of five scattered notes. If you have been running on a spreadsheet and a shoebox of thank-you cards, this is where they come together.

Fay is built for a particular reader, and she is usually the whole office: administration, bookkeeping, marketing, fundraising, event planning, and box office. Every screen here assumes that person, that the time to do a thing properly is the time between two other things, and that a feature which needs weekly tending will simply not get tended. Where Fay can work out an answer for itself, it does, and shows you the answer rather than a form.

Everything you see in Fay is yours alone. Fay is multi-tenant, which is a plain way of saying your audience, your gifts, and your notes are scoped to your own organization and are never mixed with anyone else’s list. This is the first article to read; the rest of the handbook then takes one screen at a time.

Signing up costs nothing to try. The free plan is called The Seed, “Solo is free, forever”, and the larger plan is free for sixty days, long enough to import a whole season and watch it working before you decide anything.

The shape of the app

Once you are signed in there is one top navigation, the same on every page: People (everyone on file), Events (every night you open the doors), Donations (every gift, with Campaigns, Year-end receipts and Cultivation as its neighbouring tabs), and Contact log (every conversation, and what you promised to do next). Each opens the screen its name promises, and each screen has its own article here. Matches sits as a third tab beside People, where merging duplicates belongs.

If you have invited anybody else in, they may see fewer of those than you do. Fay has three roles, and the one meant for a helpful board member deliberately cannot reach anything to do with money, Who has access explains the whole arrangement in one page.

Your own account sits apart from those, at the far right: click the round initial for your organization's name, this Handbook, your account settings, and the way out. If you are the account's owner you also get Team, where you invite people and decide what they can reach, and Billing.

Before all of them sits the Today, your home screen and daily read, the numbers that matter, the queues that need a hand, and what has changed since the last event. Most mornings you will land here first and let it tell you where to go.

Your first hour

An empty Fay can feel quiet. Here is the shortest path from nothing to a living account, an evening’s work, taken in order:

1. Create your first Season. A season is the reporting spine everything else rolls up by, gifts, events, and attendance all gather under it, so it comes first.
2. Bring in your people. Type a few by hand if that is all you have, but if you arrived with a spreadsheet, and most people do, import your roster instead, then the giving history behind it. That order matters: a gift imported before its donor exists creates a second copy of that person.
3. Create an Event under the season, so attendance has somewhere to land, then import its box-office ticket CSV and a whole audience arrives at once, already stitched to its ticket history.
4. Watch Today begin to fill. As attendance and giving accrue, the numbers come to life and Today starts naming the people to welcome, thank, or win back.

What to expect of Fay

Three habits of Fay are worth knowing on day one, because they shape everything that follows:

• It archives, it never deletes. Archiving hides a person or record from your working lists while keeping every gift, ticket, and note intact. Nothing is truly thrown away, and anything archived can be restored. See Search, filters & archiving.
• You can export everything to CSV any day. Your data leaves with you whenever you like, the filtered list on screen becomes a spreadsheet in one click, so you are never locked in.
• It suggests, you decide. Fay will point out first-timers to welcome and lapsed donors to court, but nothing merges, sends, or thanks itself. Every action waits for your click; the donor cultivation engine proposes, and you dispose.