What is the best way to organize contacts in Trello?

[Annie Tandy]

Right now I have a spreadsheet that lists the following:

Business Name

First Name

Last Name

Email Address

Tags

I need to be able to search by tags to pull up a list of contacts that I want to email for any given category. How can I do that in Trello? I connected Contalist and saw that there's an option to import from a spreadsheet, but I'm not seeing where the tags would be imported and if that's possible. Also, what would I end up with then... a list with cards for each of the contacts on a board? I'm trying to visualize how this would work.

If Contalist isn't the answer, what other ways can I organize contacts within Trello that I can then search by name or tag?

[milynnus]

@Annie Tandy 

I worked with contalist a bit. The tag, and I think you are referring to the what you setup to create the placeholders for contacts at the back of a card, are used in conjunction with the automation provided by Contalist … aka action to trigger emails using templates. Then there are groups where you can create groups so you can set emails via a single trigger action from the card. 

[Brittany Joiner]

@Annie Tandy a lot of options for how you could do this! You could be very simple and use something like Import to Trello and create labels on your board that matches the tags, and then just import the spreadsheet and map the `tags` column to `labels`

Although, if one can have multiple tags, ie, `"test", "test2"`, then that might be tricky... but this would definitely work if they only have one tag and you can create a label for each tag in your Trello board. Then you'd be able to filter by labels, which would let you search via your tags.

In either case you can always search by name via the board filter. You can search a name there and it will only show cards with that name. 

[Annie Tandy]

I tried making the tags into labels and although the board will filter by the labels, it won't spit out all the email address that fit into that label. I would have to open each individual card to copy each email address separately. I tried exporting the list, but it doesn't export the filtered results, just all of them.

Each contact has multiple tags and ultimately I need to be able to spit out all the email addresses that fit a certain category. For example, if I have 1500 contacts and each of them have anywhere from 1-5 different tags, I need to be able to filter them by a specific tag and be able to generate an email list that I can copy into an email. Hopefully that makes sense.

Any other ideas? :)

[Brittany Joiner]

@Annie Tandy you won't catch me saying these words often but... i dont think you want to use Trello. haha. First of all, you definitely dont want 1500 cards in a board... the performance would be so slow you'd never get anything done. 

Second of all, sounds like you probably want to use something like mailchimp that would let you segment audiences by tags and then send an email based on those tags. Or just use a google sheet/spreadsheet with filters, then download the ones based on the criteria you're looking for. 

[Annie Tandy]

I think you're right! I've been looking into this for two days and there really isn't a good solution in Contalist or Trello. Google sheet it is! :)

[milynnus]

@Annie Tandy 

Trello do provide http request to connect to third party software and to present the data as variables to feed your automation.

For example, I can load a NOSQL database with your contact data and using a simple query using card variables return something like {httpresponse.email} {httpresponse.name} ..etc 

Here's a quickly assembled solution on use of http to get external tables.