The Scenario
You are a major gifts officer at a nonprofit. You have 40 donor couples and family units listed in an Excel workbook on the Households tab. Column A is the household name, column B and column C are the Givebutter contact IDs for the two individuals in each unit.
The executive director wants every household record in Givebutter before the quarterly stewardship calls begin in ten days, so the development team can filter contacts by household in the platform.
The slow version:
- Open Givebutter, navigate to Households, click New Household
- Type the household name, search for contact one, add them, search for contact two, add them, save
- Repeat for all 40 households
- Get stuck on household 16 because the contact ID points to a deleted record
- Still on household 23 on day seven. The ED follows up. You say almost.
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 household row, creates the Givebutter household record, and links both contacts in one operation.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a Givebutter household for each row in the Households tab of this workbook using the household name in column A. Add the contacts whose IDs are in column B and column C to each corresponding household. Write the returned household ID into column D. If column B or C is blank, create the household with just the available contact and note 'single contact' in column E.
SheetXAI iterates through all 40 rows, creates each household, links the contacts, and writes the IDs to column D. Blank contact cells are handled gracefully.
What You Get
Forty Givebutter household records with:
- Household names exactly as entered — no autocorrect
- Both contacts linked — stewardship communications reach the right people
- Household IDs in column D — for future queries and filters
- Single-contact households noted — blank second-contact rows flagged without crashing the full run
The ED's stewardship call list is backed by Givebutter household data before the calls start.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Major donor workbooks carry long histories of accumulated inconsistency.
When contact IDs are missing and you have email addresses instead
Some rows do not have Givebutter contact IDs yet. You have email addresses in column D and column E.
For rows in the Households tab where column B or column C is blank, look up the Givebutter contact by the email in column D or column E. Use the returned contact ID. Then create the household using the name in column A and link both contacts. Write the household ID into column F.
When household names need deduplication
"The Smith Family" and "Smith Family" appear as separate rows but are the same household.
Before creating Givebutter households, scan column A of the Households tab for near-duplicate names (same surname, different formatting). Flag suspected duplicates in column E as 'POSSIBLE DUPLICATE — review.' Create households for all unflagged rows and write the household ID into column D.
When you want to tag both contacts in a household after creation
Every household's contacts should receive the tag 'Major-Giving-Unit' for development team filtering.
Create a Givebutter household for each row in the Households tab using name in column A and contact IDs in columns B and C. After creating each household, apply the tag 'Major-Giving-Unit' to both linked contacts. Write the household ID into column D and 'tagged' into column E when both operations succeed.
When you need to create missing contacts, create the household, and link them all at once
Some donors in the workbook are not in Givebutter yet. Their names and emails are in columns D and E.
For each row in the Households tab, check if a Givebutter contact exists for the email in column D. If not, create the contact using the household name (column A) split into first and last name, with email from column D. Do the same for column E. Then create the household and link both contacts. Write the household ID into column F, contact ID 1 into column G, and contact ID 2 into column H.
The pattern: one prompt covers contact lookup, creation, household creation, and linking in the right sequence.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your household workbook, then ask it to create the records in Givebutter. The Givebutter integration is included in every plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk-create contacts from an Excel workbook or the Givebutter in Excel overview.