The Scenario
A nonprofit's email coordinator is staring at a Google Sheet with 350 donor contacts. Each one is assigned to one of four fundraising list names in column C — "Major Donors", "Annual Fund", "Legacy Society", or "Event Volunteers". Each contact needs to land in the right Mailsoftly list before the year-end appeal goes out.
She's never used an import wizard to do this. She's not sure one exists for multi-list assignment. She's supposed to have everything set up by Thursday.
The bad version:
- Sort the sheet by column C, copy the "Major Donors" rows, go to Mailsoftly, find that list, use the add-contacts flow, paste in the emails, and confirm.
- Go back to the sheet, copy the "Annual Fund" rows, repeat the whole sequence.
- Do this for all four lists.
- Realize after finishing that three contacts in the "Annual Fund" group were also in "Legacy Society" but got missed because they were in two separate row blocks.
The appeal is in five days and this is half a day of clicking.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet. It reads which list each contact is assigned to and, through its Mailsoftly integration, adds each one to the correct list — without you sorting by list name or running four separate import passes.
Open the sheet and run this prompt:
Using email from column A and contact list name from column B, find each list in Mailsoftly and add each contact to the correct one — report results in column C
What You Get
- All 350 contacts processed in one pass, each added to the Mailsoftly list that matches their column C assignment.
- Column C updated with SUCCESS or ERROR for each row.
- Any contact whose list name doesn't match an existing Mailsoftly list flagged separately so you can resolve the mismatch.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
List names in the sheet don't exactly match Mailsoftly list names
The sheet says "Major Donors" but the Mailsoftly list is called "Major Donor". One character off and every match fails.
Before assigning contacts to Mailsoftly lists, fetch all available list names from Mailsoftly and write them into a new tab called 'List Reference'. Then try to match each value in column C to the closest list name. Write the matched Mailsoftly list name into column D before proceeding with assignment. Flag unmatched rows in column E.
Some contacts belong in two lists
Column C has "Major Donors, Legacy Society" for some rows — comma-separated.
For each row in this sheet, split the value in column C by comma and add the contact (email from column A) to each Mailsoftly list named in the result. Write the list assignment results for each into column D.
You have contact IDs instead of email addresses in column A
The sheet was exported from Mailsoftly and already has contact IDs in column A.
For each row in this sheet, add the Mailsoftly contact whose ID is in column A to the contact list whose name matches column C. Write success or error into column D.
Deduplicate, normalize list names, and assign contacts across all four lists
The sheet has duplicate rows, some list names have trailing spaces, and a few contacts need to be in multiple lists. Do it all in one prompt.
Deduplicate rows in this sheet by email address in column A, keeping all rows for a given email if they are assigned to different lists. Normalize list names in column C by trimming whitespace. Then add each contact to the appropriate Mailsoftly list using email from column A and list name from column C. Write results in column D.
Ask for the cleanup and the multi-list assignment together.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with contacts and list assignments, then ask it to route each contact to the right Mailsoftly list in a single prompt. See also: Check which emails already exist as Mailsoftly contacts and the Mailsoftly overview.