Importing Contacts

So you have a bunch of contacts for us eh? Excellent! Here goes:

Import a CSV of contacts

Go to Contacts. You’ll see the Contact action bar (or whatever you call it, we just came up with that) above the table of contacts. If you have permission to import contacts, then on this bar you’ll see a button to “Import”.

Clicking “Import” will take you to a page where you can import contacts different ways, like from a CSV file or via Google Contacts. For now, we’re just going to talk about CSVs.

To start, click the green “Click Here” button or drag your file into the coupon-shaped area of your screen (Note: please don’t actually clip your screen).

If you add a file that ContactDrive recognizes as 100% pure CSV, you’ll see a pop-up appear (or what we call a “modal” in the biz). It looks like this:

Import Options

There’s a few options to set as you embark on your CSV import adventure. Here they are:

Tags: If you want to assign one or more tags to every contact being imported in your file, enter that text here. Note that whether you choose to update existing contacts or not, they’ll receive this tag. So it’s a really quick way to drop a tag on a group of contacts.
Update Existing Contacts: On import, ContactDrive checks for existing contacts based on name and email address. Check this box to update existing contacts. Otherwise they will be skipped.

Note: If this box is unchecked, new contacts will still be created and any tags added in the "Add Tags" field on the import screen will still be added.

Checking this box is helpful if you have a list, but aren't certain if the contact info in the list is current. To prevent adding potentially old contact info to your database, just uncheck the "Update Existing Contacts" box and a tag will be added, but no data will be changed. Any contacts on the list not currently in your database will be added. The data may be old, but it's a starting point.
Update Only: This is the opposite of the checkbox above. Check this box to ONLY update existing contacts. If not checked, new contacts will not be created.
Note: Checking this box is helpful if you are re-importing a list of contacts who should all be in your database already, perhaps after exporting a list to cleanup data. This makes sure that only existing contacts are added and no new contacts (likely duplicates) are created.
Skip Name Matching: ContactDrive checks several fields to see if the imported contact already exists. Checking just on the contact’s name can work for small lists but cause problems with larger data sets. Check this box to disable name-only matching.

The two options to "update existing contacts" and "update only" can be confusing, and we apologize for that! Here's a table that shows you what will happen based on which boxes you check or don't check:

If you want to...	Update existing contacts	Update only
Add new contacts and update existing contacts (the default)	✅
Only update existing contacts, do not create new contacts		✅
Create new contacts, but not update existing contacts (except to add a tag)

(You would never check both "update existing contacts" and "update only" because that would be redundant.)

Import Fields

On this screen, you’ll be able to go field-by-field and make sure the inbound data from your file ends up in the correct system field. Obviously, be very careful here. You don’t want Gender ending up in the First Name field. That would make email personalization really awkward.

Here are the fields you have available to import into ContactDrive:

ContactDrive ID
Prefix
First Name
Middle Name
Last Name
Suffix
Nickname
Full/Mailing Name
Tags
Birthday
Gender
Rating
Website URL
Do Not Contact
Restricted Contact
Notes
Company/Organization
Job Title
Work email
Home email
Other email
Mobile phone
Work phone
Home phone
Other phone
Work Street
Work Street 2
Work City
Work County
Work State
Work ZIP
Work Country
Home Street
Home Street 2
Home City
Home County
Home State
Home ZIP
Home Country
Other Street
Other Street 2
Other City
Other County
Other State
Other ZIP
Other Country
[Any custom fields on your account can be imported as well]

Additionally, imports with transactions can include the following fields:

Transaction Amount
Transaction Date
Payment Method (allowed values: ‘Account transfer’, ‘Cash’, ‘Check’, ‘Credit Card’, ‘Online’, ‘Wire transfer’)
Transaction Source
Transaction Purpose
Transaction Notes
Thank You Note Sent

Once you have chosen the options you want and matched all of the fields on your csv, you’re ready to import! Just click the green “Import” button at the bottom of the screen and the import process will kick off.

After starting an import, you’ll be able to watch the status of your import on the File Log at https://app.contactdrive.io/log.

Import Matching

We have spent a lot of time building the algorithms to make sure that when you import data, that piping fresh detail for existing contacts gets merged right in. Here’s how we match inbound contacts with your current crop of contacts:

ContactDrive ID: If you have previously exported contacts and have their ContactDrive ID, you can import those existing contacts and the new updates will be connected to the existing contact. This is especially helpful if you want to pull down a batch of contacts to update names, addresses, etc in Excel in bulk fashion.
External ID: Same thing as above. Import an external ID and we’ll look for a contact with that ID already in your contacts. Currently supported external services are: EmailOctopus, DataTrust, i360 Contact ID, i360 UID, NationBuilder ID, Salesforce ID, State Voter ID.
Email: Matching on email is… imperfect. So we try a few different things. If you are just importing email but no name fields, we look for a match just based on email.
Email + Name: If you provide both email and name, we will look for a contact match using both.
Phone + Name: Can ContactDrive match a list of phones? Of course we can! But it requires a name. Just matching on phone number alone is too messy.
Name: If you just give us a name but no email, well, okay, we’ll give it a shot, but know that this could get messy. That’s why we have the “Skip Name Matching” option. If you have a large audience, for your own good please always check “Skip Name Matching” on imports.

Importing Tags

Tags are amazing, so we want you to bring all of that awesome data into Contactdrive. To import a CSV column with tags, it needs to be separated by commas or semicolons.