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Using Calenta
There’s no new dashboard to learn. Calenta shows up in the places you already work — your inbox, Slack, and Claude — and everything it knows lives in your own Salesforce. Here’s what a normal week looks like.
Your morning brief
Each weekday morning, a short brief arrives by email — or in Slack, if you’ve connected a channel. It lists up to five donors who need your attention today, and for each one, the reason: a giving pattern that broke, a first-time donor in their second-gift window, a long-time supporter going quiet. Never a name without a why.
Some mornings the brief says nothing needs your attention. That’s deliberate. Calenta doesn’t invent work to look busy — all clear is a real answer, and quiet days are for the work already on your plate.
When you see a 🔍 line under a donor, it means Calenta researched them overnight and found something worth knowing before you reach out. More on that below.
Calenta in Claude
The brief tells you who needs you. For everything deeper, Calenta is a connector inside Claude — you ask questions in plain English and the answers come live from your Salesforce. A few things people ask every day:
- “Show me my priorities today”
- “Give me a donor brief for [name]”
- “How many recurring donors do we have?”
- “Who hasn't been contacted in 90 days?”
- “Give me my board packet”
- “Give me a handover dossier for [staff member]”
There’s no query language to learn. If you can ask a colleague, you can ask Calenta — and if it can’t answer something from your data, it says so instead of guessing.
Logging what happened
The notes that matter most are the ones that never make it into the CRM. After a donor call, just tell Calenta what happened, the way you’d tell a colleague:
“Just talked to Teresa — she loved the tour, her daughter starts college in the fall, don’t ask before April.”
Calenta turns that into a structured note — with your exact words cited, so you can see precisely what it understood — and proposes it back to you. Nothing is saved until you confirm. When you do, the note is logged in your Salesforce, on the donor’s record, where your whole team can find it.
That’s the point of the whole exercise: the context that usually lives in someone’s head, inbox, or Slack scroll ends up in your CRM instead — and it stays there even when people move on.
Donor research
Overnight, Calenta researches the donors it surfaced for you, using public sources only — news, foundation filings, organizational bios. Findings show up as 🔍 lines in your morning brief, each labeled with how confident Calenta is in the match.
Honesty matters more here than anywhere. If nothing about a donor can be verified from public sources, Calenta says exactly that — zero findings and a few open questions beats a confident guess about the wrong person.
You can also ask anytime, before a meeting or a call:
- “Research [donor name]”
If the research is worth keeping, Calenta offers to save it as a note on the donor’s record — and like every write, saving always requires your confirmation first.
Board packet & reports
When a board meeting is coming, ask for the packet:
- “Give me my board packet”
You get the headline numbers against the prior period, goal progress with the monthly run-rate you’d need to hit it, donor movement — who’s new, who’s lapsed, who came back — and your revenue mix.
Every number comes from a live query of your Salesforce at the moment you ask. No stale exports, no spreadsheet assembled the night before, and nothing you couldn’t verify yourself by looking at the same records.
The Org Context page
In your portal, the Org Context page shows you exactly what Calenta knows about your organization — and, just as important, what it doesn’t:
- What it knows — your mission, gift tiers, staff, and fiscal year, as Calenta understands them.
- The field map — which of your Salesforce fields Calenta reads, and what it uses each one for.
- Signal coverage — which signals run on your data, and which can’t yet, with the reason why.
- Worth confirming — the things Calenta isn’t sure about in your setup, listed as open questions rather than silent assumptions.
If Calenta ever surfaces a donor, you should be able to see why — field by field. This page is where that promise is kept.
What Calenta never does
- Never emails your donors. Calenta talks to your team, not your supporters. Every donor touch is yours.
- Never writes to Salesforce without your confirmation. Every note, every record change is proposed first and saved only when you say so.
- Never trains on your data. Your donor data is never used to train AI models. Ever.
- Your data never leaves your Salesforce. Calenta reads it there and writes it back there. We don’t keep a copy of your donor database.
More on the reasoning behind these lines: Where we put the AI and Security.
Not connected yet? Start a free trial — setup takes about five minutes. Stuck on anything? Email joe@calenta.ai or book a quick call.