Skip to main content
Sign in

Add a donor manually

Most donors arrive automatically through forms, checkout links, or CRM sync. Use this when you need to record someone who gave offline (cash, cheque, bank transfer).

A donor in Together is a normalised record of a person or organisation that has given, or might give. Most are created automatically. The manual path exists for offline gifts and for pre-loading donors before a campaign.

Before you start

You need:

Steps

  1. Go to Donors and click Create donor.

    The Donors list page showing six donors with their names, totals, and last donation dates.
    The donors list with sample data.

  2. Pick the donor type:

    • Individual. A human donor. Fields are first name + last name (plus shared fields below).
    • Organisation. A company, association, or partnership. Field is organisation name (plus shared fields below).
    • Trust. A trust or estate. Same field set as Organisation.
    • Unknown. Use this when you have a contact you cannot yet classify.

  3. Fill in the shared fields: email, phone, address, country (defaults to Australia), and notes. None are required; the form saves with whatever you have.

    Start typing in the Address line 1 field to see suggestions — picking one fills in the suburb, state, and postcode automatically. You can edit any of them afterwards, or skip the suggestions and type each field by hand.

  4. Optionally record their web presence: a personal website, a work website, and up to ten social links. Every link must start with https://. They appear on the donor's contact card, each labelled with its site and opening in a new tab.

    The contact card also carries the donor's marketing contact setting and a Send sign-in link button that emails them a link to their own view of their giving - it refuses until they have giving Together processed.

  5. Click Create donor. You land on the donor's detail page.

    A donor's Giving tab: a strip of lifetime, largest, donation-count and average figures across the top, then their regular gifts, then anything in flight — an authorised bank debit still clearing, and attempts that didn't clear — then their open links, then the full donation history with humanised payment methods and an in-kind donation showing its category and description inline beneath the row.
    A donor's giving in one place — the lifetime figures first, then regular gifts, anything in flight, any open links, and the full history.

  6. Optionally add a photo. On the donor's page, click their picture beside their name, then Add photo (or Change photo if they already have one) and choose a PNG, JPEG, GIF or WebP image under 4MB. Together crops it to a square from the centre. To take it off again, click the picture and choose Remove photo. You need the ADMIN or EDITOR role; everyone else sees the photo but not the menu.

    A donor with no photo shows their initials on a coloured circle, the same on every page.

    A photo can also appear without anyone adding it. If the donor's email address has a picture on Gravatar (the profile-picture service many websites use), Together copies it in the first time the donor is opened or shown in the donor list, or when Together first checks the donors already in your account. Remove photo takes it off, and Together does not fetch it again unless the donor's email address changes.

    Donors can also set or remove their own photo from their giving portal. It lands on the same record, and your team can remove it here like any other.

Who the Donors list shows

The Donors list shows givers only by default: people with at least one confirmed gift to your organisation, or a completed gift through one of your recommendation sets that was not refunded or charged back. A donor you have just added, a supporter imported from a CSV or a CRM, or someone whose only gifts are still processing, failed or were removed does not appear there until a gift clears.

To see everyone, pick Everyone in the dropdown beside the search box. The choice stays in the page address (/donors?given=all), so it holds while you search, filter by tag and page through, and you can bookmark it. Pick Givers only to go back. Searching the list does not widen it: a donor who has not given is found only under Everyone.

Show archived (below the filters, when you have archived donors) shows everyone, givers or not, with archived donors added and badged. Only a donor with no gifts can be archived (see Archive or restore a donor), so Givers only would hide every one of them. While archived donors are shown, the dropdown reads Everyone and is greyed out. Hide archived puts the list back the way it was.

How matching protects against duplicates

Together never creates an exact duplicate by email. When you save a donor with an email that already exists in your org, the form blocks the save and surfaces the existing record. Pick "Update existing" or cancel.

For name + address matches without an email, Together flags a potential duplicate after save. Check the duplicate queue at Donors -> Duplicates periodically; merge or reject as you go. See Merge duplicate donors.

Donor type matters for compliance

For federal-regime compliance:

For pure fundraising operations, the type matters less. But it's easier to set correctly on creation than to correct later, because some compliance fields only appear for the right type.

In-progress donations

A donation that's authorised but hasn't cleared yet - most often a bank debit (BECS / PayTo), which can take a few days to settle - appears in its own In-progress donations panel on the donor's detail page, above their settled giving history. These are deliberately kept out of the donor's total given and out of every compliance figure (cap, disclosure threshold) until they actually clear. Once the money settles, the donation moves into the normal giving history and starts counting. If a debit fails instead of clearing, it drops out of the panel rather than ever counting.

Archive or restore a donor

Archive is for a record with no money on it, such as a test record or one created by mistake. You need the ADMIN role. To stop emailing someone, change their marketing contact setting instead; archiving is not an unsubscribe.

  1. Open the donor and click Edit.
  2. At the bottom of the page, under Archive, click Archive donor, then Archive in the dialog. You land back on the donor's page, which now says the donor is archived.

If the donor has gifts, a pending payment, a regular gift or an active checkout link, the Archive section says so in place of the button: "This donor has gifts, a pending payment, a regular gift or an active checkout link, so they can't be archived. If this is a duplicate record, merge it instead." See Merge duplicate donors.

An archived donor is hidden from the donor list and left out of every email audience, and any ask, receipt or marketing-preference links you've emailed them stop working.

To bring one back, click Show archived on Donors. Archived donors appear with an Archived badge. Open the donor and click Restore donor in the "This donor is archived" banner, then Restore. Ask, receipt and marketing-preference links revoked when they were archived stay revoked.

Together will not restore a donor while another donor in your organisation already uses the same email address. Change that donor's email before restoring. A donor that was merged into another record cannot be restored at all.

What to do next