The Scenario
You are the operations manager at a small nonprofit. Your organization has been running for three years with 200 offline donors tracked in a Google Sheet: names, emails, phone numbers, gift dates, and handwritten notes.
You have just launched Givebutter and the executive director wants every one of those donors in the platform by end of week so the team can start using Givebutter's contact tools for the spring campaign.
It is Tuesday. You have four days.
The slow version:
- Open Givebutter, click New Contact, fill in name, email, phone, save
- Go back to the sheet, cross off the row, do the next one
- Repeat 200 times
- Lose your place three times, double-create six contacts
- Get to row 72 on Thursday and realize you are nowhere close.
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 creates the Givebutter contact in one go, so you never open Givebutter's contact form once.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a Givebutter contact for each row in this sheet. Column A is first name, column B is last name, column C is email, column D is phone number. Write the returned Givebutter contact ID into column E. If a contact already exists with the same email, skip the row and write 'already exists' in column E instead.
SheetXAI reads every row, calls Givebutter's API for each contact, and writes the contact ID back to column E. At the end, you have a complete audit trail of every import.
What You Get
A completed import with:
- 200 contacts created in Givebutter
- Contact IDs in column E — so you can link back to any record later
- Duplicate flags — rows where the email already existed in Givebutter are marked, not silently overwritten
- Error flags — rows where the API call failed (malformed email, etc.) are noted in column E with the reason
You did not open Givebutter's contact form once. The sheet is now both the source of truth and the import receipt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Offline donor sheets are rarely migration-ready. SheetXAI handles cleanup and the import in the same prompt.
When names are stored as a single full-name column
Your sheet has a single "Full Name" column, not separate first and last. Givebutter's contact API wants them split.
Parse the Full Name column (column A) into first name 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 there are duplicate rows for the same donor
A few donors appear twice because they gave at two different events and someone entered them both times.
Deduplicate this sheet by email address, keeping the row with the most recent gift date where duplicates exist. Then create a Givebutter contact for each remaining row and write the returned contact ID into column E.
When some rows are missing emails
You have phone numbers but no emails for about 15 donors. Givebutter requires an email to create a contact.
For rows where the email column is blank, skip the Givebutter contact creation and write 'missing email — create manually' into column E. For all rows with an email, create the contact and write the returned ID into column E.
When you need to create contacts and immediately tag them by donor segment
You want every imported contact tagged based on their giving history: 'Major-Donor' for gifts over $1,000, 'Mid-Level' for $250-$999, 'General' for under $250.
For each row in this sheet, 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 gift amount in column D: 'Major-Donor' if over $1000, 'Mid-Level' if $250 to $999, 'General' otherwise. Write the returned contact ID into column E and the applied tag into column F.
The pattern: tell SheetXAI what to clean, what to skip, and what to create in one instruction. The cleanup happens before the import runs.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your donor list, 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 or the Givebutter in Google Sheets overview.