Managing your people and contacts

Everyone your business deals with — customers, prospects, suppliers, members — lives under People. It is the same database behind your enquiries, email marketing, sales and memberships, so a contact added here is immediately available everywhere else.

The organisation view and the tribe view

There are two ways into the same database, and which one you use decides what you see. A tribe is one location, branch or business unit inside your organisation — your own menu may name them something more specific.

A contact belongs to one tribe. That is what lets a tribe run its own marketing, see its own enquiries, and report on its own customers without the rest of the network appearing in the numbers.

Finding someone

The left-hand menu lists List All followed by each of your categories, so the group you work with daily is one click away. Above the list itself are the filters.

• Search by first name, last name, business name or email address. The start of a word is enough — "smit" finds Smith.
• Industries and Tags narrow the list to a segment.
• Added takes a From and To date — useful for "everyone who came in last month".
• Sale Status and, in a tribe, Status and Assigned To filter by where the customer has got to and who is looking after them.
• Sort reorders the result.

Filtering a tribe's list by a custom field

In a tribe, the filters also include Custom Field, which finds the people holding a particular value in one of your organisation's custom fields — everyone whose preferred branch is "North", for example. The filter only appears once your organisation has at least one custom field.

1. Open the tribe and select People.
2. In Custom Field, choose the field you want to filter on. A Value box appears beside it.
3. Enter the value. If the field is a Single Select or Multi Select field, Value is a drop-down of that field's options; for any other field, type the value.
4. The list updates to the people whose field holds that value. To remove the filter, clear Custom Field.

Export downloads the filtered list as a spreadsheet, using every filter you have set, including the custom field filter. It does not use the search box, so if you have typed a search, the download holds everyone who matches the filters rather than only the people the search found. A large export is prepared in the background and emailed to you as a download link, so filter first and export what you actually need.

The spreadsheet has a column for each contact detail. Phone numbers come twice: Mobile Phone and Business Phone as they are shown on screen, and Mobile Phone E164 and Business Phone E164 in full international form, which is the version to use if you are loading the numbers into another system. Any custom fields come after the address; a custom field that shares its name with one of these columns, such as one called Notes, is headed "(Custom Field)" so the two are kept apart. The last column, Notes, holds the notes written on each person as plain text, newest first and separated by a vertical bar (|). An export from a tribe includes that tribe's notes and the organisation's own, the same notes the tribe sees on the person, but not notes written by other tribes. The cell holds the 50 most recent notes and stops at 2,000 characters, so for someone with a long history the oldest notes are left out; open the person in Gorilla Dash to read them all.

Occasionally the search service cannot run a particular search or filter. When that happens a message appears at the bottom of the screen, and the list is left as it was rather than being replaced by a wider, unfiltered list, so the rows you can still see are from before the change and do not reflect the filter you just set. Reload the page and try again, and contact support if it keeps happening.

Adding a contact by hand

Create Person opens a form in four parts: personal information, contact details, address, and Categories & Classifications — the tribe they belong to, their categories, industries, lead source and tags. Any custom fields you have set up appear at the bottom.

Two fields are worth getting right at the start. Phone numbers are stored in full international form, so include the country code. And Mailing Lists Enabled decides whether this person may ever be added to a marketing send — off means off, whatever a campaign's audience says.

For anything more than a handful of people, import a spreadsheet instead of typing them in.

What a contact's profile holds

Opening a contact gives you their whole history with the business on one page: their details and status, the mailing lists they are on and whether their email address is deliverable, their enquiries, sales, calls, reviews, memberships and promotions, and your notes. It is the page to have open when they ring.

The lists that keep it organised

These are all set up once, at organisation level, from the bottom of the People menu.

Create your custom fields before importing a spreadsheet — a field that does not exist yet cannot be mapped to a column, and the data in that column is simply not imported.

Changing a lot of people at once

• From the list — tick the rows you want and use Update to add or remove categories and tags, or to stop those people being added to mailing lists.
• From a spreadsheet — Import People adds new contacts and labels existing ones.
• Correcting details in bulk — Update People overwrites the details of contacts you already have. It matches on the Gorilla Dash ID column, which is required, so export the list first, edit the export, and upload it back.

Who can do what

Tribe users have their own equivalents — View Tribe People and Edit Tribe People — which apply only to the contacts of the tribes they belong to.