Importing contacts to Dynamics CRM and assigning to more than a single list

I am importing just over 15,000 contacts for an established organization into a new instance of CRMOnline.  The import is a very flat file, no history, no relationships.  About as basic as you can get.  However, as I said it is an established organization and they have several different email lists, marketing lists.  CRM has a concept of importing new contacts and assigning to a list, but with that the concept is 1 new contact will reside on 1 new list.  With this organization a single contact might already reside on more than a single list.  That’s a lot of hunting and pecking for me, this org has about a dozen lists, and some contacts reside on 5 or 6 or 10 of these lists.

Here’s my work-around.

1. Create the lists in CRM.  Nothing special about them, easy peasy, like normal.

2. Create new bit (yes/no) attributes on the Contact record, no need to put them on the form, just create them, default to “no”.  We are just using these as disposable attributes for assigning of list placements.   (don’t forget to publish)

3. Make sure the source csv file has the proper columns identifying each contact as a member (or not) of each list.

csv preview

4. Do the whole mapping thing, make sure each list from the source is mapped to the corresponding new attribute.  Then import just as you would normally.

5. Once the import is done go to each marketing list and manage members and add based on an advanced find, where the bit for that specific list equals “Yes”.

evaluate members

6. Then add to list.

add to list


Do this for each list and tadah, 15,000 records organized into a dozen overlapping marketing lists in a semi-automatic way.

You can go clean up (delete) the disposable attributes or not, up to you.  I would suggest leaving them in case you wind up with a large import again.

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