My favorite email program is Apple Mail on my Mac. Apple also has a really nice Address Book application. Occasionally, I need to import some or all of my contacts from Donor Tools into Address Book, so that I can have people’s names and email addresses on my Mac and my iPhone.
It turns out there’s an easy way to import your Donor Tools database into Apple Address Book. Here’s how:
1. Export your list from Donor Tools. You can either export your whole list, or just a particular tag, as shown below.
2. Open Address Book. Go to the File menu, and Choose “Import”, then choose “Text File…”.
Select the file that you just saved from Donor Tools. The next screen shows you a long list of attributes. You’ll need to match up the attributes that Address Book expects with the attributes that Donor Tools provided. Most of the defaults should already be matched.
The one thing you’ll want to do is to import your tags for each contact into Address Book’s “Notes” field. You’ll see why in just a minute. To do this, scroll all the way to the bottom of the list of attributes, and match “Note” on the left with “Tags” on the right. See below:
Your contacts should now be imported into your Address Book. This is great except that they’re all mixed in with your other contacts. We’ll Create a Smart Group to group the donors you just imported. To do so, hold down the Option key on your keyboard and click the little button in the lower left-hand corner of the Address Book window.
The Smart Group dialog box will appear – type a name for it. For the first drop-down menu, select “Note”, then select “contains”, and type the name of the tag. In my case, all the people I just imported had a tag “churchplanters”. You could click the plus icon and repeat this step for a second tag, third tag, and so on.
(One other thing you could do is to create a smart group called “Recently Imported”. To do this, select “Note”, “has changed in”, and type “1 day”. This will automatically give you a list of people who have changed in the last day.)
There you go – your contacts have been imported from Donor Tools into Address Book.
Theoretically this could work for other address book programs as well, such as Microsoft Outlook. Would someone with Outlook like to prepare a brief tutorial like this one?
