Skip to content

Guides

Import a CSV

For the lists that live in a spreadsheet rather than an address book — a registration export, a donor segment, the sheet somebody in the office maintains.

What the file needs

A header row, and at least one column that can be messaged: a phone number for texts, an email address for email. Everything else is optional. Name your columns in plain lower case without spaces and they become merge tags of the same name.

firstname,lastname,phone,email,church
Maya,Osei,+14155550142,maya@example.com,Redeemer
Dele,Bankole,+447700900318,dele@example.com,Grace Chapel

That file gives you ::firstname::, ::lastname:: and ::church:: to write with. Add a column and you add a tag; there is nothing else to configure.

Phone numbers

Include the country code where you can — +14155550142 rather than 415-555-0142. Dashes, spaces and brackets are fine and get cleaned up, but a number with no country code has to be guessed at, and guessing wrong means the message goes nowhere.

Excel will eat the plus sign

Spreadsheet apps like to reformat anything that looks like a number, and a leading + is the usual casualty. Format the phone column as text before you type into it, or export from wherever the data actually lives rather than round-tripping through Excel.

Importing

  1. 01Save the file as .csv, in UTF-8 if your spreadsheet offers the choice — that is what keeps accented names intact.
  2. 02In Human RM, choose to import a CSV and pick the file.
  3. 03Check the count it reports. Duplicate numbers and addresses are merged automatically, so the number of people may be lower than the number of rows — that is the app doing its job.
  4. 04Write your message, using any column name as a tag, and read a few of the previews before sending.

Duplicates and overlaps

If the same person appears twice in the file, or appears in the file and in a group you already selected from your address book, they still receive exactly one message. Human RM merges on the phone number and the email address before anything sends and tells you how many it merged. The friend saved under two spellings does not hear from you twice in the same minute.

What happens to the file

It is read on your Mac and the contents stay there, in a file in your own user folder, exactly like contacts synced from your address book. Nothing is uploaded. The privacy page has the full account.