T he Activities tab does two things. First, it displays all your interactions with the contact over time; this includes all CiviCRM's built-in activities like event attendance, contributions, membership sign-up and renewal, phone calls, emails and user-defined activities. Second, it allows you to record activities with contacts. Clicking on the icons at the top of the screen (Send an Email, Meeting, Phone call) will bring up a screen where you can enter those details. T his tab can also be used to record any custom activities that you've defined for your CiviCRM installation (from Administer CiviCRM > Option Lists > Activity T ypes). T he ability to define custom activity types, and extend them with custom fields provides a powerful tool for tracking a wide variety of organisation activities. For example, you could choose to track activities such as press releases, press conferences, site visits or voluntary work. Activities are a great way to store interactions that happen at a specific time, or that link specific people. If it is important for you to know who at your organisation carried out a task, then record it as an activity. Another advantage of activities is that they record when something has happened, which is useful if you need to report on the volume of activities performed during a specific time period. You can record an activity between a given contact and multiple other contacts by adding as many contacts as you like in the With Contact field on the Add Activity form. Activities usually have their status set to Completed or Scheduled, however you may add other types of activity status as appropriate for your organisation.
CONTRIBUTIONS TAB T he Contributions tab shows any financial contributions made by the contact whose details you are viewing, as well as a summary of the contribution activity of the contact (total amount of contributions over time, total number of contributions, and average amount of contributions). T he Contributions tab also allows you to record off-line contributions using the Record Contribution button, or record a credit card transaction on behalf of the contact (useful if the contribution has been made by phone) using the Submit Credit Card Contribution button. Both of these buttons lead to forms that allow you to select the contribution type in addition to the normal contribution information collected from public contribution pages.
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