Saturday night · Winter Lessons & Carols

300
were in the room
142
you could put a name to
158
went home strangers

Fay is how you put names to the other 158.

Your box office knows who bought. Your database knows who gave. Nothing you own knows they are the same people. Fay is the book that does, and every screen below is the real thing rather than a drawing of it.

Solo is free forever · No card to start · Your first import takes an evening

One file, followed all the way

What happens to those 158

Not a feature list. One Tuesday morning at a real chorale, from the box-office export to the report the board reads in June.

Saturday
8:04 p.m.

A full house, and almost none of it is yours

Three hundred people came. A hundred and forty-two bought through somebody you can trace. The rest paid at the door, or bought under a partner's name, or came as a gift. In most databases that night ends as a single number in a spreadsheet cell.

Fay counts the strangers instead of hiding them. You cannot fix a number you never see.

Fifty-three per cent of that room is unidentified. That is the number this whole product exists to bring down.

Tuesday
9:40 a.m.

The export lands, and 213 rows sort themselves out

Download the CSV from Eventbrite, TicketTailor, TicketSource, Square, or a box-office spreadsheet somebody has kept by hand since 2014. Fay reads every row against the people you already have, matching on normalized email, phone, and address, not on a fuzzy guess.

Nothing is saved yet. This is what will happen, shown before it happens.

Sixty-one of those rows were people you already knew. They stack under the name you already have, never a second copy.

The same
morning

Three rows it refuses to decide without you

Two people at one address with one shared family email. A nickname that could be either of two members. Fay will not merge a human being on a hunch, so it asks, once, with both records side by side and the evidence spelled out.

Merge, link as a household, or not related. Dismiss a pair and it never comes back.

Aggressive suggestion, conservative action. The database never changes shape while your back is turned.

By the second
coffee

A stranger becomes somebody with a history

Every row that came in is now a person with a page holding what they have given, every night they have attended, the household they belong to, and every conversation anyone on your staff has had with them. Note how she got here. How we met, CSV import. Fay never forgets where a name came from.

Contact, roles, household, giving, attendance and notes, all on one page per human being.

One people table. A singer, a donor, a board member and a ticket buyer are usually the same person.

Every morning
after

The database reads itself and hands you a short list

This is the part nobody else does. Overnight Fay looks over everything it holds and works out what it would cost you to ignore: gifts still unthanked, promises going stale, first-timers nobody has welcomed, regulars drifting away. Then it stops. A handful of items, ranked, and empty when there is nothing to say.

Not a dashboard. A list of things to actually do, with the oldest debt first.

Cultivation is relentless rather than difficult. Fay makes it routine.

June
board meeting

"Did any of that actually work?"

The season is the spine everything hangs from, so the answer is one page rather than a week of spreadsheet archaeology. Raised against last season at the same date. Donors kept and donors lost. How full the houses were, how many people were new, and how many of those new people have since given you money.

Every board report is a season-over-season comparison, so Fay is built as one.

Sixty-eight per cent of last season's donors gave again. That sentence is why the whole trail matters.

The promises that hold

What Fay will never do

You are being asked to move the one file your organization cannot replace. These are the restraints that make that reasonable.

Never merge on a guess

Exactly one case merges by itself, an exact email match with a name that agrees. Everything else is a question you answer, and a pair you dismiss is never suggested again.

Never destroy giving history

Nothing is deleted, only archived. Merges keep a tombstone pointing at the survivor, so a gift recorded in 2019 is still findable in 2031. Money is stored in whole cents and never in floating point.

Never hold your data hostage

Every list exports to CSV, filtered exactly as you see it on screen, on every plan including the free one. Leaving is a button, not a support ticket and not a negotiation.

Never write to your database quietly

Imports preview before they commit, and re-uploading the same file twice changes nothing. You always see what will happen before it has happened.

Never sell or study your audience

No trackers, no advertising pixels, no data sold onward, and your people are never used to train anything. Your audience is yours.

Never email your donors behind you

Fay writes to your staff and nobody else. It will never send a message to a person in your database that you did not send yourself.

One evening
from first CSV to a working audience book
Sixty days
free, no card, long enough to see a whole arc
Every export
your data leaves with you, any day you ask

Go deeper

The four things it does for a living

  • Turning ticket rows into people

    Imports from any box office, identity matching that never guesses, households, and the anonymous walk-ups nobody else counts.

  • Thanking every gift on time

    The acknowledgment queue that ages, joint household giving, campaigns and pledges, and year-end receipts ready in January.

  • Knowing who to call today

    The nightly sweep, cultivation suggestions, overdue follow-ups, and an empty page on the days you have earned one.

  • Proving it worked in June

    Seasons as the spine, retention against last year to the day, house fill, and audience-to-donor conversion as a number.

Your next concert is already data

The export from your last one is sitting in a downloads folder right now. Sixty days free, no card, and it walks back out as a CSV any day you want it to.