How contacts work

The short version

1. A contact is one person your organization knows: a guest, a donor, a bidder or a member.
2. Every contact belongs to one household. A household shares one address.
3. Most contacts arrive on their own, when a person registers, gives or bids. You can also add a contact by hand.
4. The contact page shows everything the person did with you: registrations, orders, gifts and check-ins.
5. A contact can also have an account, so they can sign in to see their events and giving.
6. You find all of it under Contacts in the sidebar.

Contact, household, account

	Contact	Household	Account
What it is	One person	The people who live together	A sign-in for one contact
Example	Maria Garcia	Garcia Household	maria.garcia@gmail.com and a password
Who creates it	Bless, or you	Bless, or you	Bless, when a person registers or asks for one
What it holds	Name, email, phone, details, history	The address and the members	The password

A contact does not need an email or an account. A child, for example, can be a contact with no email.

How contacts arrive

When	What Bless does
Someone registers for an event, or a guest is named on an order	Adds a contact for each person
Someone claims a seat at a table	Adds a contact for the guest
You add a registrant, or sell a ticket at the door	Adds a contact for each person
Someone gives online	Adds a contact for the donor
You record an offline gift for Someone new	Adds a contact for the donor
Someone gets a paddle at an auction, or donates an item	Adds a contact for them
You add a contact by hand	Adds the contact you typed

Before it adds a contact, Bless looks for the same person. A person with the same first name and email is the same contact. With no email, Bless uses the first name and phone. When it finds the person, Bless only fills in details that were blank. It never writes over what you typed.

The Donor and Attendee labels

Label	Means
Donor	The contact made at least one gift that went through, online or offline. A refund does not remove the label.
Attendee (on the contact page, Event attendee)	The contact was checked in at an event at least once. A registration alone is not enough.

A contact can have both labels, or none. First engagement is the date of the first check-in or gift.

Words you will see

Contact. One person your organization knows.

Household. The people who live at one address. Bless names a new household for the last name of its first person, such as “Okafor Household”.

Head of household. The first person in a household. Other members have a relationship to them.

Relationship. How a household member is related to the head of the household, such as Wife or Son.

Account. A sign-in to your organization’s member area. A contact with an account is a member.

Pending email. An email someone gave for another person, such as a parent for a child. It gets that person’s event emails. It becomes their own email only after they confirm it.

Recent activity. The last ten things a contact did, such as “Registered for Harvest Dinner 2026”.

Who sees what

Person	Can
Owner or admin	Everything in Contacts: find, add and edit contacts, add household members, send a password reset.
Accountant	Nothing in Contacts. Accountants see Dashboard and Finance only.
Member	Their own details and their own household, from Profile and settings in their account.

What Contacts does not do

• You cannot delete, archive or merge a contact.
• You cannot move a contact to another household, or rename a household. A member can rename their own household.
• You cannot import or export contacts.
• You cannot invite a contact to make an account. Bless offers an account when a person registers or gives.