The Scenario
You are on the development team at a nonprofit. It is the start of a new fiscal year and the director wants two segmentation tags applied across a combined 230 Givebutter contacts before the spring outreach begins:
- 150 lapsed donors (no gift in 18+ months) tagged 'Win-Back-2026'
- 80 first-time donors from last year tagged 'New-Donor-2025'
You have a Google Sheet with two sections: column A is the Givebutter contact ID, column B is the tag to apply.
The slow version:
- Open Givebutter, search for contact ID 1, open their record, click Tags, type the tag, save
- Go back, next contact ID
- Repeat 230 times
- Lose your place on row 60, accidentally apply the wrong tag to three contacts, not realize until the email sequence goes out
- Someone gets a "we miss you" email the week after their first-ever gift.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads each row and applies the tag to the corresponding Givebutter contact.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each row in this sheet where column A is a Givebutter contact ID and column B is a tag name, add that tag to the contact. Write 'done' into column C if the tag was applied successfully, or the error message if it failed. Skip any row where column B is blank.
SheetXAI iterates through all 230 rows, applies each tag via Givebutter's API, and writes the result to column C. At the end, you can filter column C for errors and handle just those.
What You Get
A complete tagging run with:
- 230 tags applied — one per row, correct tag to correct contact
- Status in column C — 'done' for success, error message for failure
- Blank rows skipped — no accidental empty-tag assignments
- Full audit trail — the sheet shows exactly what happened to every row
The segmentation is done before the outreach team starts building their email sequences, and the column C status log is the receipt if anyone asks.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Tagging sheets have their own class of messiness.
When some contact IDs are outdated or invalid
A handful of the 230 IDs were from a list export six months ago and some contacts have since been merged or deleted in Givebutter.
For each row in this sheet, attempt to apply the tag in column B to the Givebutter contact ID in column A. If the contact is not found, write 'contact not found — verify ID' into column C instead of 'done'. Continue processing all other rows.
When tags need to be applied differently based on giving tier
Instead of a flat tag per row, you want tiered tags. Column C has the donor's total giving amount and the tag in column B should be 'Win-Back-Major' if they gave over $1,000 or 'Win-Back-General' if under.
For each row in this sheet, apply a tag to the Givebutter contact ID in column A based on the amount in column C: use 'Win-Back-Major' if the amount exceeds $1,000, or 'Win-Back-General' otherwise. Write the applied tag into column B and 'done' into column D.
When you want to remove an old tag before applying the new one
Last year's lapsed donors already have a 'Lapsed-2025' tag that should be removed before the 'Win-Back-2026' tag goes on.
For each row in this sheet, first remove the tag 'Lapsed-2025' from the Givebutter contact in column A (if it exists). Then apply the tag in column B. Write the result into column C: 'replaced' if both operations succeeded, 'added only' if the old tag was not present, or the error if something failed.
When you need to tag, then queue the contacts into a Givebutter campaign in one pass
After tagging, the win-back contacts should also be added to the 'Spring Re-Engagement 2026' Givebutter campaign.
For each row in this sheet, apply the tag in column B to the Givebutter contact ID in column A. Then add that contact to the Givebutter campaign with ID [your-campaign-id]. Write 'tagged + added to campaign' into column C if both succeed, or the specific error if either step fails.
The pattern: one prompt handles the conditional logic, the cleanup, and the API calls in the right order.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your tagging sheet, then ask it to apply the segments in Givebutter. The Givebutter integration is included in every plan. For related workflows, see how to pull major donor segments from Givebutter or the Givebutter in Google Sheets overview.