How Virtuous connects people, giving, and outreach into one unified system
Virtuous isn't just a database—it's a relationship management system. Every feature exists to help you understand donors better and communicate with them more personally. This guide shows you how the pieces fit together.
Everything in Virtuous starts with understanding who you're working with. The system uses a two-level structure that mirrors how relationships actually work in the real world.
Contact = The entity that receives mail and makes gifts. Think of it as the tax filing unit. There are three types: Households, Organizations, and Foundations.
Individual = An actual person within that contact. Every contact has at least one. Households often have two (spouses). Organizations have employees.
One person = One individual record. If John Smith appears in both his household and an organization, use a placeholder on the organization and link them via a Relationship. Never duplicate a person.
"Everyone lives at home." Place a person's full profile in their household contact. Use placeholder records with relationships for their organizational affiliations. → See: Contacts vs. Individuals
Knowing where to find (and enter) information is half the battle. Here's the split:
This matters because gifts are tied to tax entities (contacts), not individuals. When a married couple files jointly, their combined giving history lives on the household contact—regardless of whose name was on the check.
When a gift comes in, it doesn't just sit in a pile. Virtuous tracks why it came in (the Campaign) and what it supports (the Project).
Think of it this way: the Campaign is the stimulus (what triggered the gift), and the Project is the destination (where the money goes). This separation lets you answer different questions:
"How effective was our spring mailing?" — Look at Campaign results.
"How much have we raised for scholarships?" — Look at Project totals.
All this structured data becomes powerful when you can filter and find exactly what you need. That's what Queries do.
A query is just a saved search with specific criteria. Instead of scrolling through thousands of contacts, you tell Virtuous: "Show me all households tagged 'Major Gift Likely' who gave over $1,000 last year but haven't given yet this year."
Queries only work if the data is consistent. If some contacts are tagged properly and others aren't, your query results will be incomplete. Every time you enter data correctly, you make future queries more reliable for everyone. → See: Your First Query
Tags are how you categorize contacts for communication and analysis. They're simple labels you attach to contacts—but their power comes from consistency.
Some tags you'll apply manually (like communication preferences when a donor tells you). Others are applied automatically by the system based on giving behavior. → See: TMC Tags Reference
Here's how it all connects:
When you open a contact record, you're seeing all of this at once: who they are, how they prefer to be contacted, what they've given, which efforts brought them in, and the full history of your team's interactions with them.
That's the power of a unified system. Instead of piecing together information from spreadsheets and email threads, you have everything in one place—structured so you can act on it.
This overview gives you the mental model. Now dive deeper:
Contacts vs. Individuals — The foundational concept in detail
Campaigns and Projects — How giving is organized and tracked
TMC Tags Reference — Complete list of tags we use and when
Your First Query — How to find exactly what you need