The Scenario
You are a volunteer coordinator at a community nonprofit. 150 new supporters filled out paper sign-up forms at your festival booth last weekend. A volunteer entered all 150 into an Excel workbook: first name, last name, email, phone.
Now you need every one of those people in Raisely. But you cannot bulk-create all 150 — some have certainly given before, and a duplicate donor record is worse than a missing one.
The slow version:
- Open Raisely admin, go to People, search the first email
- Note "already exists" or "not found," mark the row in the workbook
- When new, also click through to create the account manually
- Repeat 149 more times
- An hour in. Forty rows processed. Team briefing is at 2 PM.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI checks each email against Raisely and creates accounts only for new supporters, logging the result per row.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each row in this workbook, check if the email in column C already exists in Raisely. If it does not exist, create the user with the name from columns A and B and the phone from column D. Mark column E 'Created' or 'Already Exists' for each row.
SheetXAI checks all 150 rows, creates accounts only where needed, and writes the result to column E. When done, column E is a complete log of what happened on every row.
What You Get
A processed sign-up workbook with a row-level audit trail:
- "Created" for every new supporter added to Raisely
- "Already Exists" for every email that matched an existing record
- No duplicates — SheetXAI checks before it acts
- All 150 rows processed — no one dropped because time ran out
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Paper forms collected by volunteers have predictable quality issues.
When some email addresses are malformed
A few volunteers collected emails by hand and a few have obvious typos or missing characters.
Before checking Raisely, validate the email format in column C. Flag invalid emails as 'Invalid Email' in column E and skip those rows. For valid emails, check Raisely and create accounts or mark 'Already Exists'.
When new supporters should be tagged with their event source
Each new supporter should carry a "Community Festival 2025" tag in Raisely for future campaign targeting.
For each row, check if the email exists in Raisely. If not, create the user and apply the tag 'Community Festival 2025'. Mark column E 'Created + Tagged' or 'Already Exists'. Log any errors in column F.
When first and last name are in a single column
The volunteer used one "Full Name" column instead of separate fields.
Split the full name in column A into first and last name before checking Raisely. Then check each email, create new accounts with the split name fields, and log the result in column D.
When two event booths each have a separate workbook tab
Two volunteers worked at different booths. Each used a separate tab. Merge before upserting.
Combine the sign-up data from the 'Booth A' tab and the 'Booth B' tab. Remove rows where the same email appears more than once, keeping the first. Check each unique email against Raisely: create accounts for new supporters, mark 'Already Exists' for known ones. Log results in the 'Merged' tab, column E.
The pattern: validate, merge, upsert, and log in one prompt. Hand the workbook to the next person without a briefing.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to process your next event sign-up workbook into Raisely without creating duplicates. The Raisely integration is included in every plan. See also how to deduplicate your existing donor database or the Raisely in Excel overview.