Contact log

What was said, through which medium, and what to follow up on and when.

What the contact log is for

The contact log is Fay’s memory of every conversation. A gift tells you what someone gave and a ticket tells you they came; a contact tells you what was said, the phone call about a matching gift, the letter that came back undeliverable, the quiet “please stop emailing me”, through which channel it happened, and what you promised to do next.

The log lives at /interactions, reached from Contact log in the top navigation, where the page wears the eyebrow Contact. Nothing here is stranded on its own screen: every contact you record also appears on that person’s Contact tab in People, and one you log from a person shows up here.

The contact list

The list shows one row per contact, newest first, across six columns: Date (when the contact actually happened, not when you typed it up), Person, Medium, a one-line Summary, the Follow-up badge described just below, and Made by, who actually had the conversation.

Made by is worth a paragraph, because it holds two different facts and shows the one you need. Most of the time it is the staff email of whoever typed the note up, which is what a shared office needs. But when the contact was made by somebody who does not sign in to Fay at all, such as a trustee, a volunteer or a board member working their own network, you can credit them, and then the column shows their name with a quiet second line saying who wrote it up. Both facts survive: the board wants to know which trustee opened the door, and the office still needs to know whose write-up this was.

Each row ends in its actions. When a follow-up is still open you get Mark done; once it is done that button becomes Reopen. A kebab (⋯) menu holds Edit and Archive, and in the archived view, Restore. Fay archives contacts rather than deleting them, so a contact you log is never truly lost.

The follow-up badge

The Follow-up column is what turns a record of the past into a to-do list for the future. Its badge reads one of four ways:

Due Aug 14: a follow-up is scheduled and its date is still ahead; the badge carries the day it falls on.
Overdue Aug 14: a scheduled follow-up whose date has passed and which nobody has marked done. It shows in red so it cannot quietly slip.
Followed up: a scheduled follow-up that has been completed, because someone clicked Mark done.
A muted middle dot (“·”), no follow-up was scheduled for this contact at all.

Open follow-ups feed straight into your morning: the Today list raises a single follow-ups due row counted from exactly these badges, and the navigation bar carries the same count.

Mediums

The Medium records how the contact happened. The form offers six:

Email
Phone
In person
Letter
Text message
Other

There is a seventh, reserved medium, System, that Fay writes for itself, to auto-log its own events such as the note left when you merge two duplicate records. The manual Log contact form only ever offers the six human mediums; System entries appear in the log but are recorded for you.

Filters & deep links

Three dropdowns narrow the list, and they combine.

Medium

All mediums by default, or pick any single medium, Email, Phone, and so on, to see only contacts made that way.

Follow-ups

All contacts shows everything; Due now keeps the ones due today as well as the late ones, the same set the navbar badge counts and the worklist row opens; Open follow-ups keeps every row with a follow-up still to do, however far off; and Overdue follow-ups narrows to the ones whose date has already passed.

Made by

Anyone by default. The dropdown lists everybody who has actually been credited with a contact. A name appears only once somebody has, so it is never a filter for nothing, and nobody has to maintain a roster of who counts. Picking a name is how you answer “what has this trustee brought us this season?” in one click.

The contact log also deep-links to a single person, two ways. Follow a link from someone’s record and the list shows just their contact history, the very same log you see on their People Contact tab. Follow View all contacts they made instead and you get the mirror image: every conversation that person had on your behalf.

Logging a contact

Log contact opens a short form, the same one whether you start it here or from a person’s Contact tab. Its fields are:

Person: search by name to attach the contact to a record.
Made by: optional, and blank means you. Search for somebody when the conversation was really theirs: the trustee who knows everyone, the volunteer who talks to half the lobby. It is a person on your People list, not a login, so you can credit somebody who will never sign in to Fay.
When: the date and time the contact actually happened.
Medium: one of the six above.
Follow up on: an optional date; set it and the row earns a Due badge, or leave it blank and the row shows a muted dash.
Summary: the single line that appears in the list.
Notes: room for the longer detail that does not belong in a one-line summary.

Whoever is signed in is always recorded as the person who logged the contact. You never set that by hand, and crediting somebody in Made by does not replace it. And if you open the form from a cultivation suggestion, resolving the contact automatically marks that suggestion done, so welcoming or thanking someone clears them from your queue in a single step.

Maria’s day

A board member calls the Riverside line first thing: he has an idea about a matching gift and wants to talk it through next month. Maria listens, makes a couple of promises, and hangs up, then opens the Contact log before the details fade.

She clicks Log contact, searches his name, sets the Medium to Phone, and writes a two-line Summary of the matching-gift idea. Because she owes him a call back, she sets Follow up on to three weeks out and saves. The new row shows Due Aug 14, and her own email sits in Made by, the call came to her, so it was hers.

For three weeks that blue Due Aug 14 badge waits quietly. If the day arrives and Maria has not called, it does not disappear. It turns to Overdue Aug 14 in red and climbs her worklist as a follow-up that is due, where a half-time staffer running box office, books, and thank-you notes at once cannot help but see it. One phone call and a Mark done later, it settles into Followed up and lets go.

The week after, the same board member emails to say he has spoken to two of his neighbours about the December concert. Maria writes both conversations up, but this time she puts his name in Made by, because they were his conversations and not hers. Come the board meeting she filters the log to him and has the answer to a question nobody could previously answer at all: what the board's own outreach actually brought in.