FAQ for Communications

YES – you import contacts.

Required columns are “First” and “Last”. Other optional columns are “Email”, “Phone”, “Phone Type”, “Roles”, “Custom 1”, “Custom 2”, and “Custom 3”. For all practical purposes, if just importing parents, then the minimum import would be “First”, “Last”, “Email” and then “Phone” if it’s available. Ie:

Jon Stevens jon@test.com

Erica Stevens erica@test.com

Doug Clare

(the relationships part is entirely option but can be quite useful – so it assumes both players & parents are being imported into the above, and that most times the players don’t have email addresses (ie – don’t use the parent’s email address for the player, just leave it blank)

MAYBE – you import relationships.

Required columns are “First”, “Last”, “Related First”, “Related Last”, “Title”. And typically the relationships import is that of a player being imported with their parent to define that relationship. For example, fi the contacts import had “Jon Stevens”, “Erica Stevens” (both with emails), and “Doug Clare”, then the relationships import would have two rows:

Doug Clare Jon Stevens Father

Doug Clare Erica Stevens Mother

YES – You import tags (assuming there’s some sort of sub-grouping as indicated earlier in this email chain)

Required columns are “First”, “Last”, “Tag”. I’m pretty sure the tag needs to exist beforehand but it’s possible it doesn’t. The import page will say after validating if the tag has to be there. This is why it matters whether or not the relationships were created, because usually the “tags” are assigned to the players but the contact information is provided to the parents. Continuing our example above, let’s say there are at least two Tags that were created – “Player”, “U12” (and probably others, but just focusing on those two).

If the players were NOT imported, then the tags import would need to be:

Jon Stevens Player

Jon Stevens U12

Erica Stevens Player

Erica Stevens U12

In other words, for each parent of a player that belongs to any of the tags, they need their own line. That’s why importing players, and the relationships to their parents, makes tagging much easier. If player WERE imported, then the tags import would just be:

Doug Clare Player

Doug Clare U12

• When sending out a communication using a tag, the system will look at any contact in the tag and automatically notify their relationships.
• Also – a tip for anyone is that if any of the fonts on the screen are too small, use the browser's zoom in/out features to see it more easily.