Contact statuses

Every contact has exactly one status. It’s the single most important classification in Karani, because most reports filter on it.

The five statuses

Status	Use it for
Contact	Someone in your network you haven’t asked yet, and aren’t currently planning to. Friends, colleagues, acquaintances.
Prospect	Someone you intend to ask. This is your active pipeline.
Donor	Someone who currently gives.
Lapsed Donor	Someone who used to give and has stopped.
Archive	Someone you want out of your working list without deleting their history.

What each status changes

Status isn’t a label you set and forget — it determines what Karani shows you.

Prospect contacts appear in the Prospective Giving report, where you set an annual potential for each of them. Those potentials feed the “potential” figures on your dashboard and Finances page. A prospect with no potential set contributes nothing to your forecast.

Donor contacts are the population for most financial reports: Donors Behind on Giving, Unthanked Donors, Out of Touch Donors, and Fiscal Year Giving by Donor.

Lapsed Donor is the population for the Lapsed Donors report. Moving someone here takes them out of your active donor reporting without pretending they were never a donor.

Archive contacts are hidden from the contacts list and from reports by default. Their history stays intact — gifts, interactions, everything — and you can find them any time via the Archived Contacts report on the Reports page.

Changing a status

One contact: click Edit on their profile and change Status.

Several at once: tick them in the contacts list and use With Selected… → Change status.

Keeping statuses honest

Statuses drift. Someone stops giving and stays marked Donor; a prospect becomes a donor and nobody updates them. Two habits keep it under control:

When you enter a first gift, move the contact from Prospect to Donor.
Once a quarter, run Lapsed Donors and Donors Behind on Giving and re-classify what you find.