How can I automatically assign contacts to a Group or Company as soon as they’re imported into the database?

Let’s say that you have a list of prospects who live in the state of New York, and you would like to group them all together based off of their state. To import those contacts from your source file and into your database and have them automatically added to a group:

1. Create a Group in Act! called New York Prospects
2. In the Contacts tab of the group, click Add/Remove Contacts…
3. Under Dynamic members, click Edit Criteria…
4. Set the dynamic criteria to State = New York AND ID/Status = Prospect
   
   Note: For more detailed information on creating and managing Group membership, refer to the following knowledgebase article:
   
   How to create and manage Groups in Act!
   
   
   
5. In your source file, make sure that the fields “State” and “ID/Status” exist, and make sure that each contact you want to include in this Group has the value for “State” as “New York” and value for “ID/Status” as “Prospect”
6. Perform your import as usual

Note: Alternatively, if your requirements for adding contacts to a Group are more detailed than the example above and/or you don’t want to use dynamic membership, you can create a new Contact field in your database, as well as a matching field in your source file. You can add a matching value to that new field in the source file for each contact you wish to go into a particular Group, then perform a custom import so that you can make sure the fields are mapped correctly. Once the import is done, you can create a lookup based off of that value, then manually add the contacts to the Group as static members.

Note: If you are using v16 and later, and you do not mind your contact’s business address matching the Company, you can set preferences that will allow for automatic Company creation and linking based on the number of Contacts who have the same Company name. For more information, refer to the following knowledgebase article:

How to set automatic company creation preferences in Act! v16 and later



Let’s say that you have a list of contacts who work at a company called CH TechOne that you’d like to add to the same Company record. To import those contacts from your source file and into your database and have them automatically added to a Company:

1. If a Company doesn’t already exist for the contacts you’re importing, create one
2. Under the Contacts tab of the Company, click Add/Remove Contacts…
3. Under Dynamic members, click Edit Criteria…
4. Set the dynamic criteria to Company = CH TechOne
   
   Note: For more detailed information on creating and managing Company membership, refer to the following knowledgebase article:
   
   How to create and manage companies in Act!
   
   
   
5. In your source file, make sure that the field “Company” exists, and make sure that each contact you want to add to that Company has the value for Company as CH TechOne
6. Perform your import as usual

Note: Alternatively, if your requirements for adding contacts to a Company are more detailed than the example above and/or you don’t want to use dynamic membership, you can create a new field in your database, as well as a matching field in your source file. You can add a matching value to that new field in the source file for each contact you wish to go into a particular Company, then perform a custom import so that you can make sure the fields are mapped correctly. Once the import is done, you can create a lookup based off of that value, then manually add the contacts to the Company as static members.