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How can we add a tag or custom field to a contact?
How can we add a tag or custom field to a contact?
Updated over 2 months ago

Impactive does not currently allow administrators to manually add a tag or custom field to a single contact via the administrator dashboard (though this functionality will likely be introduced in the future). Therefore, this article describes the other ways that tags and custom fields can be added to contacts.

There are two main ways for tags and custom fields to be added to contacts:

Adding Tags and Custom Fields via User Reports

The most common way for tags and custom fields to be added to contacts is via reports submitted by users during the process of participating in Impactive actions (like Peer-to-Peer Texting, Phone Banking, etc.). All user action types include a reporting mechanism that allows users (i.e. volunteers) to fill a report on the contacts they reach, and that report is composed of the specific tags and custom fields that the administrator designates that they want to gather. Find out more about tags and custom fields in typical user reports by clicking those links.

Administrators Manually Adding Tags and Custom Fields to Contacts

As noted above, Impactive does not currently allow administrators to manually add a tag or custom field to a single contact via the administrator dashboard (though this functionality will likely be introduced in the future).

For now, the only way for administrators to add tags and custom fields to contacts themselves (other than via the typical user reports method described above) is to update contacts by importing a CSV with tag/custom field data. Here's how to do that:

  1. If the tag and/or custom field that you want to add to contact(s) doesn't already exist, create it; learn more about creating tags and custom fields at those links.

  2. For each tag and/or custom field that you want to add to contact(s), locate the slug for that tag/custom field under Data > Tags or Data > Custom Fields. The slug is the second column of the tables shown on those pages.

  3. Create a spreadsheet/CSV and include the three column headers that are always required upon a contact list import: first_name, last_name, and phone.

  4. In those headers, add data for the row(s) of contacts that you want to add tags/custom fields to. You may want to add this manually if it's just a few contacts, or if you're updating contacts in bulk, you may want to first export contacts from Impactive to easily copy/paste that data into your new CSV.

  5. Copy the slug(s) from step 2 and paste them in exactly as additional column headers in your CSV.

  6. For each of your contact rows, add data into those column(s) for the tag(s)/custom field(s):

    1. For tags, add either TRUE or FALSE/blank into the column, because tags are binary.

    2. For custom fields, add the desired custom field value itself.

  7. Now, import this CSV as you normally would.

Impactive uses phone number as the unique ID for contacts, so if you upload a contact with the same phone number as they already had within Impactive, a duplicate contact will not be created - the same contact will simply be updated with the tag/custom field data you uploaded.

Want to check your work? You can always check which contacts have a certain tag or custom field by checking the contact's individual profile page (their tags and custom fields will be listed there), or by using contact filters to check if a contact appears in a filter for that tag/custom field.

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