People

What the People area is for

People is the heart of Fay. Everything else, a ticket order, a gift, a phone call, a household, ultimately hangs off a person, and this is where each person’s whole relationship with your organization is gathered onto one page. If you only ever open one screen in Fay, it is this one.

The list at /people is reached from People in the top navigation, the first of three tabs sharing that row with Households and Matches, three views of the same directory: everyone, everyone grouped into households, and the possible duplicates waiting to be resolved. Matches is staff-and-above only, because resolving a duplicate means weighing both people's giving history; a contributor sees only the first two tabs.

The people list

The list shows one row per person with Name, Email, Phone, and Roles. Each name carries a small headshot, or the person’s initials when there is none. The header tells you how many people match the current view, for example “612 people”, and offers Add person (which opens in a modal, so you never lose your place), Export CSV, Import (see Importing your history), and View archived.

Search by name or email in the box at the top. Matching is forgiving: it uses trigram similarity, so “Whitfeld” still finds “Whitfield,” and partial spellings are fine.

Filters & segments

Four filters narrow the list. Each shows its current choice as “Filter: value,” and changing one keeps the others in place.

Role

Limits the list to people who currently hold a role. The choices are Member, Board member, Volunteer, and Staff, the same badges you see in the Roles column.

Audience

Filters by where someone sits in their attendance life-cycle, Fay works this out from real ticket history (see the Audience & attendance article). Alongside “Everyone” and “Audience members” (anyone who has ever attended), the segments are:

• First-timer: has attended exactly one event.
• Returning: has attended a second time.
• Regular: three or more distinct events.
• Lapsed: a former attendee whose last visit was over twelve months ago.

Giving

Splits the list three ways: Donors, Never given, and Lapsed since last season, people who gave last season but have not yet given this one. The first two find, say, the regulars who have never once been asked; the third is your win-back list, and it is the same set the Today list raises when the season is far enough along to be worth acting on.

The two checkboxes

Two checkboxes narrow the list to the people you can actually reach. They are filters rather than actions: nothing is sent, and nothing is changed. Ticking one hides everybody who fails it, which on a young database can be everybody.

Has opted in to email keeps people who have opted in, are not flagged do-not-email, have an email address, and have not bounced or complained. Opting in is a positive act: it is a tick box on the person's record, or it arrives with a ticket import that carried a marketing-consent column. Somebody you typed in by hand is not opted in until you say so, so an empty list here usually means the consent has not been recorded yet rather than that the filter is broken.

Happy to receive postal mail keeps people with a street and a postal code and no do-not-mail flag. A record with only a name and an email address will not appear.

The six-tab person record

Open a person and their record is organized into six tabs, five if you are a contributor, who has no Giving tab. Their headshot sits beside the name, or their initials if you have not added one. An Archived badge appears by the name if the person has been archived.

Photos are optional and small: a JPEG, PNG, WebP or HEIC up to 8MB, added on the same form as everything else, with a Remove this photo tick box for when somebody wants theirs gone. If you choose a replacement and tick remove at the same time, the replacement wins, the upload is the more deliberate act of the two. Fay crops to a square rather than letterboxing, because headshots arrive in every shape a phone can produce.

Contact

The default tab: email, phone, and address, each with its consent in plain sight. A Do not email or Do not mail badge appears when that flag is set; when someone has opted in you see Opted in, with the source and date.

That consent is something you set: Has opted in to email is a tick box on the person’s form, for when somebody has said yes in person, on a sign-up sheet, or at the box office. Fay records the date and that you set it by hand, and it will not let you type the source in yourself, where a consent came from is a record, not a field. An import that carries a consent column sets it too, and keeps its own source. Opting somebody back out clears the whole record rather than leaving a stale date behind, so a later re-opt-in is a new consent with a new date.

“How we met” records where the person first entered Fay, logged by hand, from a ticket import, a donation form, or a CSV import. Below sits the contact log with a “Last contacted” date and a Log contact button. Underneath that, for the people who open doors for you, sits Contacts they made, every conversation this person had on your behalf, which is a different list from the contacts made with them and appears only when there are any.

Roles

Every role the person holds or has held, with its section and its start and end. A role with no end date reads Active. You can add a role, end one today (which preserves the history), or remove a mistaken entry outright. See the Roles article for the full story.

Household

Shows the person’s household, its greeting, and joint lifetime giving, or offers to add them to one. Grouping matters because letters and receipts roll up by household.

Giving

Lifetime giving, the last couple of seasons at a glance, and a table of every gift. Status badges are covered just below.

This tab is the one part of a person’s record that not everybody sees. A contributor, a trustee helping with contacts and outreach, has no Giving tab at all. It is not hidden from them; it is not there, and the figures behind it are never even fetched.

Attendance

The person’s audience segment badge, how many events they have attended, and when they first and last came, with a table of every ticket. The Attended column reads “Ticketed” (bought, attendance unknown), “Yes,” or “No-show.”

Notes

A free-text place for the things that do not fit a field, “brings a different grandchild every spring,” “prefers to be called Peg.”

Giving & attendance badges

On the Giving tab, each gift carries its status so nothing slips:

• Thanked /Unthanked: whether an acknowledgment has gone out.
• Receipted: included in a year-end tax receipt.

These are the same badges you will meet again on the Donations page, where you act on them in bulk.

Archiving & export

Fay archives, it never deletes. Archiving a person hides them from lists while keeping every gift, ticket, and note intact; View archived lists them with a per-row Restore. And Export CSV hands you exactly the filtered list on screen, names, contact details, consent, roles, sections, audience segment, attendance, and lifetime giving, so your data always leaves with you.