Does your organization regularly gather unique pieces of information about your donors? Account admins can add contact custom fields to make sure every detail is recorded! Contact custom fields are available for both individual and company contacts, and can currently be applied by manually adding contacts, importing contacts, or re-importing your contacts to update your existing records.
Contact custom fields can currently be applied by manually adding contacts, importing contacts, or re-importing your contacts to update your existing records. You can also manage contact custom fields, and edit answers on an individual basis.
Please note that contact custom fields will not show in the checkout flow for donors to fill out themselves. You must have account admin status to create, edit, or archive contact custom fields. Campaign Editors and CRM Managers can edit custom field answers on a contact's profile.
Contact custom fields come in a variety of formats, including:
Text – Text input of either short answers or paragraph style. (Max 255 characters.)
Number – Numeric value, as a whole number or a percentage.
Date – Select a single date or a date range.
Toggle – Yes / no toggle, with the ability to set a default.
Option – Multiple choice list, which can be restricted to one choice, or allow multiple selections.
Create new fields ➕
In your dashboard, head to the Contacts page.
Click on the three dots icon, located in the upper right, and choose Custom Fields.
Click the blue New field button. In the popup, choose the type of custom field you want to create.
Fill in your details and choose whether this field should appear when entering a new contact.
Click Create.
You can now answer this custom field when creating a new contact, or follow our instructions for adding custom fields to existing contacts.
Apply custom fields ✅
Now that you've created your contact custom fields, you'll need to apply them to your contacts. This involves picking a method for adding information to your contacts, whether you are adding new contacts or want to add custom information to your existing contact base.
Manually add contacts
You can add custom field information one by one as you add new individual or company contacts manually on your Contacts page. The custom fields will appear at the bottom of the new contact form for you to fill out.
New contact imports
Make sure you've created all the contact custom fields you want to use, then follow our guide on importing contacts or importing company contacts! Your new contacts will be imported with contact custom fields included.
Existing contacts
If you have an existing contact base in your account, you can retroactively add custom field information without duplicating your contacts. You'll need to:
Add custom field answers to the spreadsheet in the appropriate columns
Worried about duplicates? As long as you don't alter the contact information in the spreadsheet (first and last name, plus primary email or phone number), no duplicates will be created – our system can identify that these are already existing contacts. For company contacts, keep the Givebutter Contact ID column in your spreadsheet so your existing company records are updated instead of duplicated.
Edit or archive fields ⚙️
You can edit the wording of the custom field/question after it's been created and applied to contacts.
Go to the Contacts page.
Click on the three dots icon, located in the upper right, and choose Custom Fields.
Click the three dots [...] next to the custom field you want to edit or archive.
Choose Edit or Archive. You cannot delete contact custom fields, but archiving will remove them.
In the Edit popup window, you can edit the custom field label (the text/question shown), edit the default selection (varies based on the type of custom field it is), and edit the option for this custom field to display when a new contact is created manually. You can also archive the contact custom field from this window.
Edit custom field answers ✏️
You can also edit custom field answers, or the data that has been filled out for a specific contact – for example, if a contact was not able to attend a planning meeting originally, and you need to change their RSVP to a "yes". To edit custom field answers:
Locate the contact you'd like to edit. You can also filter your Contacts page by custom field.
Open the contact's profile and click on the Custom Fields tab at the top of the page.
On the right side of any custom field, click the pencil icon to make edits to the responses.
In the popup window, you can edit the answer for this contact. This applies to all custom field types.
Click Save when you're done. (Changes to custom field answers are logged in the contact's activity feed as Custom field updated.)
Clicking the trash icon will clear the entry for this custom field reply. It will not delete the custom field entirely.
Filter by custom field 🧮
When contact custom fields are applied to your contacts, you can filter and segment your contacts to easily access your organized data. You can use segments with contact custom fields to save mailing lists for use in Engage. To filter your contacts by custom field:
Go to your Contacts page, and click More filters.
Search for or locate the Custom fields filter.
Click on a specific filter, and indicate the custom field reply you want to filter by.
Contacts that meet the contact custom field parameters set in the filter will be displayed. From here, you can save this list as a dynamic segment, or you can export it.