The transparent backlog your synagogue is missing.

Congregants visit /help on your tenant subdomain, pick a type (Request / Idea / Question / Issue), describe what they need, and submit. They get an email confirmation with a status-lookup link. Pastoral category routes to confidential by default — bypasses the Project Board entirely.

• Anonymous-friendly: name optional unless your tenant config requires it
• Per-tenant pastoral routing: pastoral submissions auto-flag confidential
• Status link emailed back: track without an account
• Rate-limited to prevent abuse: 10/IP/hr, 5/email/hr

Staff inbox at /pulse/triage. Filter by status, type, category, age. Status pills with counts. Inline expand-to-edit. State machine with explicit transitions — no ambiguous limbo states. Internal notes for staff-only context, public comments threaded into the email reply.

• States: new → acknowledged → in_progress → waiting_on_info → deferred → resolved → closed
• Defer requires structured reason (budget / capacity / dependency / out_of_scope / future_cycle)
• Internal vs public comment toggle — defense-in-depth filtered at every read site
• Audit log entry per state transition + per comment for full forensic trail

Higher-order initiatives — sanctuary lighting refresh, religious school upgrade, capital campaign — get their own card on the public board. Card shows status, last update note, and a stale-warning when no admin update has been published in 60+ days. The forcing function transparency creates.

• Cached 5 minutes — public, indexable, no auth
• Status pills: planning / active / paused / complete
• "Informed by N congregant requests" tally counts non-confidential ticket links
• Admin "Save & Publish update" button explicitly stamps last_public_update_at — no silent edits

Submitters can revisit their ticket via the email link or — if they're an authenticated member — see all their submitted tickets at /help/me. Reply directly via email or the public status page; threads land back in the staff inbox.

• Tokenized status URL with 90-day TTL, revocable by admin
• Authenticated member dashboard at /help/me filtered to submitter_user_id
• Mint fresh status link on demand if the original email is lost
• Inbound email reply threading via Postmark webhook

Tickets that haven't moved in 7 days surface to admins via a daily email digest. Reports page slices volume by week, top categories, median response + resolution times, SLA compliance. Real metrics for board meetings and staff reviews.

• Daily 9 AM ET cron walks idle tickets, emails Pulse-permission admins
• Reports: volume by week, top categories, median first-response, median resolution, SLA-acked-in-2-business-days %
• Aggregate-only reports — no PII, view-tier permission
• Per-status inventory grid + 4 KPI cards with color-coded SLA thresholds

Acknowledgement emails, status-change emails, idle nudges — every template editable per tenant via the standard email-templates page. Plain text or constrained HTML, per-template variable reference panel, live preview, send history.

• Best-effort sends — log row written even when Resend fails
• Resend webhook updates delivered / bounced / complained per send
• Variables: {{tenant_name}}, {{public_id}}, {{title}}, {{status}}, {{status_url}}, …
• Email log viewer at /settings/email-templates/log