Uploading Contacts into a Group

Uploading Contacts into a Group

If you have an list of contacts from your organization tools such as CRM or company records, you can upload the data using an excel document (.xls/.xlsx) so as to populate your groups with the contact data.
To upload respondents from an existing database of contacts, do the following:
  1. Copy all the information into an excel document first.
  2. From the Left hand menu, navigate to Groups and select the group you wish to upload the contacts to.
  3. Select the “Add contacts option” and select “Upload Contacts”. 
  4. Click on Download sample template to download the Sample excel doc.
  5. Copy all your information into the relevant fields, you can delete the fields that you do not require, once done, save your document.
  6. Go back to the ‘Add contacts’ page in your group, click on ‘choose file’, to upload your excel (.xls/.xlsx) document.
  7. Click on “ Upload” and the uploading background task will start.
  8. Once uploaded, the list of respondents will appear in the group under the Contact List
The Echo platform currently have a contact upload file limit of 1 MB. This is to ensure efficiency of the system. If you have a file larger than this, we recommend breaking the file into small batches.

Recommendations for formatting your contact upload file

  1. Download and use the ‘Sample Template’ excel doc provided in the Echo Platform. This is so that the field names in the excel doc match with the standard fields names already in the platform i.e. phone, name, location, labels and internal id.
  2. Standard fields are in lowercase format in the sample template.
  3. You may also upload custom fields such as GENDER, AGE, BIRTHDAY. Custom Field are in all CAPS LOCK format in the sample template.  
  4. For any custom fields created (fields not already provided in the sample template), remember to create them in the platform first, otherwise the system will not be able to upload them.  
  5. Remember to keep the formatting in the ‘phone’ field so that phone numbers are recorded properly, and not appearing in a different format from what you had inserted. 
  6. Ensure that all contacts' phone numbers are in a text format i.e. 254722123456 or 07221234656.

When adding contacts to your group via an Upload, the platform checks if there are errors in the upload file and reports the issues encountered.

The following are the types of errors that the platform reports:

Duplicate Phone Number

“Duplicate phone number” means that the platform has detected duplicate contacts in the Excel sheet. In other words, the same phone number was used for more than one row in the sheet.

If an Excel sheet has duplicate contacts, the platform will upload one contact and flag the rest as duplicates.


Invalid Phone Number

“Invalid Phone Number” means that the contact that was uploaded to the platform has a phone number that is missing some digits, or has more than the expected number of digits, or has a prefix that isn’t valid for the country.

Recommendation: Ensure that the Excel sheet has valid phone numbers and in the correct format, that is, using the correct country code e.g 254722000000 if your country is Kenya.

Invalid Phone Number
Valid Phone Number
254 7 22 000 00
254 7 22 000 000
254 7 22 000 0000
254 7 22 000 000
254 6 (22) 000 000
254  7 (22) 000 000
722 000 000
254 7 (22) 000 000

This number is currently in use by another organization using the same shared service. 

“This number is currently in use by another organization using the same shared service” means that the phone number already exists in another account that uses the same shared short-code. Read more about how shared shortcodes work.

Recommendations: 
Option 1: Ask the user to provide an alternative phone number
Option 2: Ask the user to reach out to the other organization and ask them to delete the phone number

This phone number is locked in the XXX  group and can’t be moved

“This number is locked in the XXX group and can’t be moved” means that the contact exists in a different group which has the Locked Contact feature enabled.

The locked contacts feature disallow contacts from self-registering out of a group therefore restricting them from registering into another group.

Recommendation: Unlock contacts by disabling the lock contacts feature.

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