Adding contacts

A contact is a person: their details, their documents, their answers, their history. It outlives any one portal, so when somebody comes back you are looking at what they already gave you rather than a blank form.

There are three ways to get people in, and most accounts use more than one.

One at a time

On a portal, use the box labelled Add from contacts in the people panel. Existing contacts appear as you type. For somebody new, click Add beside the box (or + Add new contact in the list) and fill in their details without leaving the page. Either way they land on that portal.

You can also work from Contacts with New contact, which suits building a list before you have a portal to put it on.

First name is the only required field. Everything else (last name, email, mobile, company, website, social links, tags, internal notes) is optional, so a half-known person is still worth adding. Fill in the rest as it arrives, or let a portal collect it for you.

Add an email if you have one. It is where their link and emails are sent, and it is how the CSV import recognizes someone you already have.

In bulk from a spreadsheet

Use Import CSV on the Contacts screen to move an existing list in. Only FirstName is required, rows whose email you already hold are skipped, and nobody is emailed. The columns, limits and pitfalls are in importing contacts from a CSV.

Let them add themselves

A portal can publish a self-registration link. Anyone who fills it in becomes a contact on that portal and gets their own private link straight away. It suits open intakes where you do not have the list in advance. See self-registration.

Tags

A contact can carry up to 20 tags, each up to 50 characters: Electrician, Casual, Northgate, whatever you sort by. They are for filtering your contacts and for picking people when you add them to a portal. See tagging and filtering contacts.

Tag as you go. Tagging a few hundred contacts after the fact is a job nobody enjoys.

What a contact holds

An account holds up to 3,000 contacts. Open any one and you see their record across every portal they have been on, not only the one you came from:

• Details. Their standard fields, any custom fields you defined with their current documents, their photo, and the link to their own page listing every portal they are on.
• Portals. Every portal they are on.
• Emails. What has been sent to them and when.
• Requests. Everything they have been asked and what they sent back. See a contact's request history.

Getting help

If something here does not match what you see on screen, email [email protected] and we will take a look.