Custom Fields

The built-in contact fields cover the normal stuff — names, emails, phones, addresses. Custom fields cover everything specific to your world: chapter, precinct, membership tier, t-shirt size, whatever you actually track.

Creating a field

1. Go to Settings > Custom Fields.
2. Add a new field.
3. Choose what it attaches to — Contacts or Activity.
4. Give it a title and a description.
5. Pick a type:

• Text
• Number
• Date
• List (select one) — a dropdown; you define the options
• List (select many) — the same, but multiple choices allowed
• True/False
• User — points at a member of your workspace, for ownership-style fields

1. Save.

The field then shows up on contact or activity forms, in the grid's column picker, and in filters.

Field slugs

Every field gets a slug — a short machine-readable name. You'll find it listed on this screen, and you'll need it any time data arrives from outside the app: mapping an inbound webhook, or writing to the API. Copy it exactly.

Unique ID fields

A text field on contacts can be marked as a Unique ID. This is a small setting with large consequences, in a good way.

A field marked Unique ID becomes a matching key. When data arrives from an import or a webhook carrying that value, ContactDrive uses it to find the existing contact rather than creating a second one. If you have an ID from another system — a membership number, a CRM ID, a donor ID — putting it in a Unique ID field is the single most effective thing you can do to keep duplicates out.

Finding a field

Once you have a few dozen, use Search custom fields at the top of the list rather than scrolling.

Editing and deleting

Edit freely — renaming a field's title is safe and doesn't affect the data or the slug.

Deleting is not safe. Removing a custom field removes the data stored in it, for every contact, and that isn't something we can put back. If you're unsure, stop using the field rather than deleting it.