Silent Auction Pro - Importing and Exporting Contacts Help

Importing and Exporting Contacts

An organization's existing contacts list can be imported into the group's Silent Auction Pro™ account for a nominal charge. Whether your contacts are imported by the Silent Auction Pro support team or you enter them one by one, they are always available for export at no charge.

To prepare data for import

To obtain a quote for importing your contacts into Silent Auction Pro, email sales@silentauctionpro.com. Accepted formats are Excel (.xls or .xlsx only) or a comma separated values (.csv) file. For best results, the data to be imported should be as complete as possible.

Organize data in columns the exact spelling of the fields in the table below as column headers.
FirstName and LastName columns are required and must contain data. All other fields are optional.
Do not include duplicate contacts, embedded quotes, or extraneous commas. A comma is interpreted by the database as a special character that separates the fields in CSV files.

The Notes column in the table below shows restrictions associated with certain fields.

Importing Contacts Field Options
Field	Description	Notes
FirstName	Contact's first name	Required field, up to 30 characters.
LastName	Contact's last name	Required field, up to 128 characters.
Company	Name of company with which contact is associated	–
Email	Contact's email address	–
Address	Contact's primary address	–
Address2	Additional or alternate address	Used for suite numbers, apartment numbers, or post office box numbers
City	Contact's city	–
State	US or Canadian state or province	Restricted to two-character standard, such as CA for California
Zip	US or Canadian postal code	–
AreaCode	Primary phone area code	Restricted to three digits, no parentheses
PhoneNumber	Contact's primary phone	Up to 20 characters
AreaCode2	Alternate phone or work phone area code	Restricted to three digits, no parentheses
PhoneNumber2	Alternate phone or work phone	Up to 10 characters without parenthesis or hyphens, such as 1235551212
CellPhone	Any valid North American cell phone number	which can include parenthesis, hyphens or periods, such as (408)583-4880
Label	Contact label	–
Affiliation	Contact affiliation	–
Notes	Notes associated with this contact	–
RefNumber	Unique contact ID number; Can be used to cross-reference contacts in Silent Auction Pro to other systems	Up to 20 characters
MarkAsBidder	Mark this Contact as a bidder for the current Event	Enter 'yes' or leave it blank
Website	Website address	–

For companies where you do not know the appropriate contact's name, use Community Supporter as the first name and repeat the Company name for the last name. That way when you write emails or letters and address them as "Dear [FirstName]" [FirstName] will be replaced with Community Supporter so the letter will start with "Dear Community Supporter".

To export your contacts or mail list

Group and auction administrators can export contact data from Silent Auction Pro in CSV format. Once exported, the data can be easily imported into spreadsheets such as Excel and manipulated as desired. If you need to print mailing labels, export the data into your favorite spreadsheet and then use their mail merge functionality to print to off-the-shelf mailing labels such as Avery mailing labels.

Click the Repors & Exports menu item and choose the Export Contacts/Bidders/Donors menu option.
To filter the list, select the Contacts, Bidders, or Donors from the drop-down list.
Further filter the list by affiliations, labels, or events (optional) by selecting from the associated drop-down lists.
After applying the desired filters, click the Export List button to download the file to your local drive.