To create a donor account, click 'Donors' from the left hand navigation menu and then click 'Add New'.

Select the type of donor account you are creating:

Enter the donor's name, which is the only required field. All other information, including email address and phone number, is optional.
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Once you've entered the donor information, click Create Donor.

After creating a donor account, you'll immediately be taken to the donor Profile tab. Profiles allow you to track any details you might need for managing your donor outreach.

The following key donor details are always visible on the left side of the profile.

Prospect Attributes is a card on the donor profile that holds the three details your team uses to judge where a relationship stands: how much a donor could give, how much you plan to ask for, and where they sit in your cultivation process.
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These are details your team enters. AwardSpring doesn't calculate them from giving history they reflect your own judgment about the relationship.
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Any attribute you haven't filled in shows as Not set.
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The capacity tiers and cultivation stages your team sees are yours to define. AwardSpring ships a default set, and you can rename them, add your own, or remove ones you don't use, so the card matches the language your shop already speaks.

To edit them, go to Settings and then Donor Profiles.

Note: once donors have been assigned to a stage or tier, the number of donors in each is displayed alongside it, and you won't be able to delete one that still has donors assigned. Move those donors first.
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The About card holds the durable facts about who this donor is, the things that stay true regardless of what they've given or where they sit in your cultivation process. Information is gathered from the middle panel of the Profile tab and gives you a quick reference to donor information.
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You can edit the items you want to pin on the left panel by clicking the gear icon.
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Constituency Tags describe how a donor relates to your institution, for example alum, parent, trustee, faculty or staff, community member, corporation or foundation. A donor can carry more than one.
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Tags are descriptive rather than evaluative. They're separate from Capacity tier, which is your judgment of how much a donor could give, and from Cultivation stage, which is where the relationship sits in your process. The tags tell you who they are.
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Your tag list is yours to define. Go to Settings → Donor Profiles → Constituency Tags to rename tags, add your own, or remove ones you don't use.
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Constituency Tags are useful for segmenting, whether you're building a list of alumni parents or everyone with a corporate affiliation. It's worth agreeing on a tag vocabulary as a team before people start adding their own.
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The Relationship Manager is the staff member who owns this relationship, the officer of record.
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Giving Summary is a quick read on what this donor has given. Unlike Prospect Attributes, these figures are calculated by AwardSpring from the gift records on the account, so you don't enter them.

Use the soft credits toggle to include or exclude soft-credited gifts in these totals. Soft credits let you recognize a donor for a gift they influenced but didn't personally make, such as a company matching an employee's gift. Turning the toggle on will change the figures shown, so if a total looks higher or lower than you expect, check the toggle first.
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Suggested Ask is an optional SpringIQ feature that recommends how much to ask each donor for, based on their giving history and the thresholds your team sets. The recommendation appears on the Suggested Ask card in the left column of the donor profile, where an officer can accept it or override it.
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You control the logic behind it. AwardSpring does not decide what a "major gift" means at your institution, you do.
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To configure it, go to Settings → SpringIQ → Suggested Ask.
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Use the AI Suggested Ask Widget checkbox at the top of the page. When it's off, the Suggested Ask card does not appear on donor profiles.
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Thresholds decide which giving band a donor falls into, which in turn decides how their ask is calculated and presented.

Set these to match how your shop already talks about giving levels. If your leadership annual society starts at $2,500, set your annual fund ceiling to $2,500 rather than working around the default.
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Multipliers turn a donor's giving history into a recommended amount. Each band uses its own multiplier, and the annual fund band uses three so it can offer a choice of amounts.

Higher multipliers produce more ambitious asks. Lower multipliers produce safer ones.
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The live preview on the right of the settings page shows this using three sample donors:
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Annual fund. A donor whose last gift was $250 is offered three amounts, one per annual multiplier: $250, $375 and $500, with the middle amount recommended. Officers pick from the three.
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Leadership annual. A donor whose last gift was $5,000 gets a single target of $7,500, shown with a plus or minus 15% range.
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Major gift. A donor whose last gift was $50,000 gets a target of $100,000, presented with a low figure of $75,000 and a stretch figure of $150,000.
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So the annual band gives officers options, and the two higher bands give a target with room either side.
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The right side of the settings page classifies three sample donors using your in-flight edits, so you can see the effect of a change before it takes effect.
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This matters because changing a threshold or a multiplier changes the suggested ask on every donor record it applies to, not just new ones. A small change to the major gift multiplier moves the recommended ask for your entire major gift pipeline.

Two things to know about saving:

Because of that, it's worth deciding your thresholds and multipliers as a team, checking the preview, and making changes deliberately rather than experimenting on a live site.
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The suggested amount is a starting point, not a decision. Officers can override it on the donor profile by expanding on the suggest ask.
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The last two areas include Funds the donor is associated with as well as any Relationship association with other donor profile.
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About holds the donor's descriptive details, grouped into sections.
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Constituency tags describe how the donor relates to your school, for example Board Member, Faculty/Staff, Alumni, or Parent. A donor can hold more than one. Select tags from the dropdown, and remove one by clicking the x on its chip.

Your tag list is defined in Settings → Donor Profiles → Constituency Tags.
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Click the gear icon in the top right of the About card to open Configure About fields. From here you can:

Click Save layout when you're done, or Reset to default to return to AwardSpring's original arrangement.
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Important: this layout applies to every personal donor profile at your organization, not just the donor you're viewing. Donor organizations keep their own separate arrangement.
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A few fields are fixed in place and cannot be moved. Custom fields are labelled as such in this window, so you can tell your organization's fields apart from AwardSpring's standard ones.
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Because the layout is shared across your whole organization, it's worth agreeing on an arrangement as a team rather than each person reordering to taste.

Contact holds emails, phone numbers, and addresses. Each type works the same way: a donor can have as many as you need, and one of each is marked Primary.

The primary entry is the one AwardSpring uses by default, so if a donor gives you a new preferred email, add it and set it as primary rather than overwriting the old one. That way the previous address stays on record.
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When you add an address you can record:

Tick Make this the primary address if it should become the donor's default.

Seasonal is useful for donors who spend part of the year elsewhere, and Mailing lets you separate where a donor lives from where they want post sent.

Relationships connect a donor to other users and organizations in your site, for example a spouse, an employer, or a family foundation.
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Each relationship shows the connected record and the relationship type, with a pencil icon to edit it and an x to remove it.
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To add one, click Add relationship, search for the person or organization, and enter the relationship type.

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Note: when you add a relationship, AwardSpring will also assign this donor's officer to the connected record if that record does not already have one.
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Removing a relationship only removes the connection. It does not delete either donor record.

Other holds the Donor stage field: Lead, Prospect Donor, First-year Donor, Recurring Donor, Lapsed Donor, or Do Not Contact, depending on how your school has configured it.
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Donor stage is a legacy field. Existing data is preserved so nothing is lost, but cultivation tracking has moved to Cultivation stage on the Prospect Attributes card.
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The following key donor details are always visible on the right side of the profile.

Research Notes is a free text field for whatever your team needs to record about a donor that doesn't belong in a structured field: background from a prospect research session, context from a conversation, or a reminder about how to approach someone.
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Notes are visible to staff only. Donors never see them, including on their donor portal.
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Because this is one shared field rather than a per person notepad, treat it as a team record. It's worth agreeing on a light convention, for example adding a date and initials to each entry, so colleagues can tell who wrote what and when.

Associated Scholarships lists the scholarships connected to this donor. When there are none, the card tells you so.
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To connect one, click Add scholarship.
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This is useful when a donor's support is tied to a specific award rather than a fund, or when you want the donor record to show which scholarships their giving makes possible.

The Funds card shows the funds this donor gives to. Each row lists:

So a row reading "2 gifts, last gift Mar 20, 2026, $581" means this donor has given twice to that fund, most recently in March 2026, for $581 in total.
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To connect this donor to another fund, click Add fund.
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This card is a quick way to answer two common questions: which of our funds does this donor care about, and when did they last give to each.

Data Enrichment fills in details about a donor from outside sources, so your team spends less time researching basics by hand.
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Click Generate to run enrichment for this donor. Enrichment runs automatically each quarter or you can generate it yourself as a one-off.
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Click View sources to see where each enriched detail came from.
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The External ID field records this donor's identifier.
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The buttons in the top right of the donor profile header give you the actions you'll reach for most often without leaving the record. They're icon only, so hover over one to see what it does.

Click the three dots for the additional actions.

Opens AwardSpring as this donor sees it. Use it to check what a donor is looking at when they contact you with a question, or to confirm their portal shows what you expect before you point them to it.
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Sends this donor a password reset email.
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This is available for individual donors who have an active email address on their record. If a donor has no email address, there is nowhere to send the reset, so add an email to their Contact card first.
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Flags the donor record as deceased. Use this rather than deleting the record, so the donor's giving history stays intact for your reporting and stewardship records while the account stops being treated as an active relationship.
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Deleting a donor removes everything associated with the record, including their giving history, activity history, and documents. This cannot be undone.
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Deleting is appropriate for a record created in error, such as a test account or a genuine duplicate with no history worth keeping. It is rarely the right answer for a real donor with giving history, because that history is what your fund reporting and reconciliation rely on.