The Scenario
You are the operations manager at a small nonprofit. Your organization has been tracking 200 offline donors in an Excel workbook on the Donors tab: first name, last name, email, phone, and gift date.
You have just moved to Givebutter and the executive director wants every donor in the platform by end of week so the spring campaign can use Givebutter's contact tools.
It is Tuesday morning. You have four days.
The slow version:
- Open Givebutter, click New Contact
- Read a row from the workbook, type first name, last name, email, phone into Givebutter's form
- Save, go back to the workbook, mark the row done
- Repeat 200 times, lose your place twice, create six duplicates
- Hand the ED a list of 183 contacts on Friday, explain the rest need to be done manually.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads each row and creates the Givebutter contact, so you never open Givebutter's form.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a Givebutter contact for each row in the Donors tab of this workbook. Column A is first name, column B is last name, column C is email, column D is phone. Write the returned contact ID into column E. If a contact already exists in Givebutter with the same email, write 'already exists' in column E instead of creating a duplicate.
SheetXAI reads every row, creates each contact via Givebutter's API, and writes the ID back to column E. You have a complete import receipt before Friday.
What You Get
A completed import with:
- 200 contacts created in Givebutter
- Contact IDs in column E — for future reference and downstream operations
- Duplicate detection — rows with an email that already exists in Givebutter are flagged, not silently overwritten
- Error flags — rows with malformed emails or API failures are noted in column E with the reason
The ED sees all 200 contacts in Givebutter without you building a separate import file or navigating the platform UI.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Offline donor workbooks carry years of accumulated data quality issues.
When names are stored as a single combined column
The workbook has a Full Name column, not separate first and last. Givebutter's API requires them split.
Parse the Full Name column (column A) in the Donors tab into first and last name. Then create a Givebutter contact for each row using the parsed names, email in column B, and phone in column C. Write the returned contact ID into column D.
When duplicate rows exist for the same donor
Several donors appear twice because they were entered at two different events.
Deduplicate the Donors tab by email address, keeping the row with the most recent gift date where duplicates exist. Then create a Givebutter contact for each unique row and write the returned ID into column E.
When some rows are missing email addresses
About 15 donors have phone numbers but no email. Givebutter requires an email to create a contact.
For rows in the Donors tab where column C is blank, skip Givebutter contact creation and write 'missing email — create manually' into column E. For all rows with a valid email, create the contact and write the returned ID into column E.
When you need to create contacts and immediately segment them by gift history
You want each imported contact tagged based on their historical giving: 'Major-Donor' for over $1,000, 'Mid-Level' for $250–$999, 'General' for under $250. Gift amounts are in column E.
For each row in the Donors tab, create a Givebutter contact using first name in column A, last name in column B, and email in column C. Then apply a tag based on the amount in column E: 'Major-Donor' if over $1,000, 'Mid-Level' if $250 to $999, 'General' otherwise. Write the returned contact ID into column F and the applied tag into column G.
The pattern: cleanup, skip-logic, and tag application all happen in the same prompt, before the contacts hit Givebutter.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your donor workbook, then ask it to import the contacts into Givebutter. The Givebutter integration is included in every plan. For the next step, see how to bulk-apply tags to Givebutter contacts in Excel or the Givebutter in Excel overview.