CSV Import

You can bulk-import contacts into any list by uploading a CSV file. Use this to bring in official stakeholder registers, department contact lists, supplier lists, or public-service notification recipients.

CSV format

Your file must be a CSV with a header row.

The email column is detected automatically. The importer first looks for a column named email, e-mail, email_address, or emailaddress (case-insensitive). If none is found, it falls back to the first column whose values contain @ signs. If no email column can be detected, the import is rejected.

Every column other than the email column is stored as metadata on each contact. If one of those columns is named name, full_name, or fullname, its value is used as the contact's name instead of being stored as metadata.

Example CSV:

email,name,department
alice@example.com,Alice Mwangi,Public Health
bob@example.com,Bob Ochieng,County ICT
carol@example.com,Carol Wanjiku,

In this example, department is stored as metadata on each contact.

How to import

1. Go to Audiences in the sidebar.
2. Select the list you want to import into.
3. Click Import CSV.
4. Select your CSV file.
5. Click Import.

Import results

After the import completes, you will see a summary:

• Imported -- new contacts added to the list.
• Skipped -- rows whose email already exists in the list (duplicates by email).
• Errors -- rows that could not be processed (empty email, invalid email format, or a missing email value). Up to 50 error rows are reported.

Requirements

• File format: CSV with a header row.
• Encoding: UTF-8 is preferred (a byte-order mark is handled). Files that are not valid UTF-8 are decoded as Latin-1 as a fallback.