Getting Started with Contacts in ActivistCentral

Contacts are at the center of ActivistCentral. This is where you keep the people your organization communicates with, organize the information you know about them, and keep track of your interactions over time.

Whether you're working with members, supporters, volunteers, voters, or other constituents, the Contacts directory gives you one place to find and work with the people your organization serves.

Open your Contacts directory

From the left sidebar, select Contacts.

The Contacts page is your organization's people directory. From here you can find people, add new contacts, organize your records, and open individual contact profiles.

Find the people you need

Use the Search box to find someone by name, email address, or phone number.

For larger contact directories, filters make it easy to narrow the results.

Filter with tags

Tags are simple labels you can attach to contacts to help organize them.

If you select more than one tag, you can choose:

• Match any selected tag to find contacts who have at least one of those tags.
• Match all selected tags to find contacts who have every selected tag.

Filter by contact status

You can also narrow your results based on phone and email information. For example, you can find contacts with or without an email address or valid phone number, as well as people who have unsubscribed, opted out, or been marked Do Not Call.

Search and filters can be combined, which is especially useful when you're working with a large contact directory.

Use Columns to choose which information you want to see in the directory. If your organization uses Custom Fields, those can be displayed as columns too.

Add a new contact

Click + New Contact to add someone manually.

Enter the person's first name, along with any last name, email address, or phone number you have. You can then open the contact and add more information, such as:

• Address
• Tags
• Custom Fields
• Source information
• Phone and voice contact status

For larger groups of people, Import CSV lets you bring contacts into ActivistCentral from a spreadsheet instead of entering them one at a time.

Open a contact profile

Click a person's name in the directory to open their contact profile.

The profile brings together what your organization knows about that person. Depending on the information you have collected, this can include:

• Contact information and location
• SMS, email, and voice reachability
• Tags
• Custom Fields
• Connections to organizations or other people
• Membership information
• Recent interactions and activity

The Interaction Timeline gives you a recent history of activity involving that contact.

You can also use Log Interaction to record things that happen outside an automated campaign, such as a phone conversation, email, in-person conversation, or note.

Organize contacts with Tags, Custom Fields, and Lists

ActivistCentral gives you several ways to organize your contacts, and each serves a different purpose.

Tags are labels you attach to people. They're useful for creating simple groups or identifying characteristics that matter to your organization.

Custom Fields let you store information that isn't part of the standard contact record. Think of them as adding your own columns to your contact database.

Lists let you save search and filter criteria as a reusable group of contacts.

There's one important thing to understand about Lists: they're live, not static. As contact information changes, people can automatically enter or leave a List based on whether they still match its criteria.

That makes Lists especially useful for audiences you expect to use again.

More tools for managing your contacts

As your contact directory grows, you'll find a few additional tools on the Contacts page:

• Import CSV brings contacts into ActivistCentral from a spreadsheet or another system.
• Export CSV exports all contacts, your current filtered results, or contacts you've selected.
• Find Duplicates helps identify records that may represent the same person.
• Bulk actions let you add or remove tags or delete multiple contacts at once.

Find Duplicates is a review tool. It helps you identify possible duplicates but does not automatically merge contact records.

Start with the people you know

You don't need to configure everything before you begin using Contacts.

Start by adding or importing your people. Use Tags and Custom Fields as you discover what information is useful to your organization. When you find yourself using the same searches and filters repeatedly, save them as Lists.

Over time, each contact can become more than a name and phone number. It becomes a useful record of your organization's relationship with that person.