Contact and Outreach

Contact & the directory

orgware runs the tribe's front door — the contact forms the public uses to reach the tribe — and, behind the login, a contact directory for leadership. This is the contact service at contact.waccamaw.org.

The public contact forms

Anyone can reach the tribe through the contact form on waccamaw.org. It's not one inbox — each topic routes to the right people, so a genealogy question, a membership request, and a language inquiry all land with whoever handles them.

Topics include: archeology, demonstrations, federal recognition, genealogy, interviews, language, membership fees, pauwau, becoming a member, camping, solstice, youth days, website support, and more. A couple are special:

• Request to become a member opens the tribe's official membership/genealogy intake form.
• Website support asks what went wrong (can't access the portal, a broken link, a page not loading) so it reaches the right person.

Every submission is protected against spam and bots (a hidden honeypot, Cloudflare Turnstile, content checks, and per-address rate limits), emailed to the topic's recipients with the sender as reply-to, and the sender gets an automatic acknowledgement. Submitters can also opt into the newsletter. None of this requires an account — it's the public's way in.

The contact directory (leadership)

Behind the login, leadership has a directory — the people and organizations the tribe stays in touch with, and the lists that organize them (distribution lists, committees, governance bodies, event rosters).

A directory contact can hold multiple emails and phones, a link to the person's place on the roll (if they're a member), and their list memberships. Contacts come from several sources — the contact form, a Google-contacts import, the roll sync, or added by hand — and are de-duplicated by email so the same person isn't listed twice.

Who can see the directory

Access is tiered, so a role gets exactly the visibility it needs:

• Admin — full read/write: edit contacts, manage lists and memberships, and grant access to others. (Admins are fixed, so no one can be locked out.)
• Viewer — read-only: browse and search the directory.
• Counts — totals only: how many contacts, how big each list — no individual names or details.

Sensitive fields (notes, street address) never leave the service, and the "counts" role never sees an individual record at all. Admins grant the viewer and counts roles; the same access list is the shared source of truth the member portal reads, so a person's role is consistent across the platform.

How it connects

The directory and the membership roll are separate databases linked only by a soft tribal-ID reference. A nightly sync mirrors the roll into the directory (additively — it never deletes), so members show up in the directory without the two ever being entangled. A member's portal login works here too, because both services trust the same sign-in.

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Next: For leadership.