About the Contacts List In the Participant Center

Your Contacts list is automatically generated in your Participant Center with the name and email address of people you have contacted by emails via the Participant Center Email area as well as anyone who has made a donation to support your fundraising efforts.

You can add more of your friends and family to this Contacts list by importing other online contact lists or address books in email services that you use, like Google gmail, Yahoo! mail, Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, AOL, and Apple. You can also manually enter contacts.

For more complete information, refer to Using the Contacts List in the Email Area of Your Participant Center.

Importing Contacts With a CSV File

Although you can always manually type in a contact, you can upload a file of contacts to make it much easier to enter multiple contacts at one time. You can do this by exporting your contacts list or address book from another email service that you use or by creating a new csv (comma separated values) file.

To create a file, you can use at text editor (such as Microsoft Windows Notepad) or spreadsheet application (such as Microsoft Excel) that lets you save a document as a csv file.

In the first line of the file, enter three column headings: First,Last,and Email.  On subsequent lines, enter each contact's first name, last name, and email address. For example:

When you are done, save the file with the extension CSV (if using a text editor such as Notepad) or “Save As” CSV format (if using a spreadsheet program).

If you have contacts or an online address book in another email service, you can use their tool to export the file in this proper format and save it on your personal computer. You should name the file with something easy to remember and in your working directory so you can access it easily.

Although the file can contain several columns of information about the contacts (like their nickname, street address, and so on), only the First Name, Last Name, and Email address are imported into your Participant Center.

Note that we provide a direct import from the Google gmail and Yahoo! mail services where you can skip this step. Refer to the appropriate help topic for Importing Contacts Directly from Your Google gmail Account or from Your Yahoo! Mail Account.

For more complete information about using the CSV file, refer to Importing Contacts Using a CSV File.

Changing the Column Mappings

When you import contacts in a CSV file, the system attempts to accurately match appropriate name and email columns in the CSV file being imported with the First Name, Last Name, and Email address columns required for the Contacts list in the Participant Center. It ignores other columns in your CSV file.

If the columns from your CSV file were not accurately matched, you can open the mapping and change to the column in your CSV file that does match. For example, if the system used the Nickname column instead of the First Name column in your CSV file, you can click the drop-down on the Import page and click the First Name column from your CSV file.

Selecting Contacts

Either way you choose to import your contacts, you can decide to import all of the contacts that have been retrieved or to go through the list and select each contact manually.

Working with Import Results

The system compares the name and email address information for each contact in the CSV file with the information that exists in your Participant Center Contacts list.

Any contact already in your Participant Center is considered a duplicated contact if the First Name, Last Name, and Email address in the CSV match exactly and they are not imported again.

If the information for a contact in the CSV file is similar (for example, the email address matches or the name matches), the system flags that result and puts in it the Possible Duplicate Contacts list. You can look at both pieces of information and decide to:

• Update the Participant Center contact with the information from the CSV file
• Ignore it so that the information in your Participant Center remains the correct information
• Make a completely new contact from the information in the CSV file

If the system cannot understand the information (that is (there is no name associated with the email address or the email address is not complete), it places the result in the Rejected list. You can then examine the information and make make notes to get the appropriate/missing information and add the contact later.

This step is described in each of the online help topics about importing contacts.

For a complete list of the help topics about contacts, refer to Using the Contacts List in the Email Area of Your Participant Center.