Importing Your Contact Lists

Your contact lists power every text send, so getting them in cleanly is worth five minutes of care. Here's how uploads work and what happens to your file once it lands.

Where to upload

Uploads happen on your campaign's Messages page in the portal. Drag your file onto the dropzone or click to browse. We accept CSV, XLS, and XLSX — the formats every voter-file vendor and spreadsheet program exports.

What your file needs

• A first name column and a last name column.
• A phone number column.

Extra columns are fine — we simply won't use them. The name columns matter more than they look: they're what merge tags like {first_name} pull from, so a list uploaded without names can't be personalized. See Creating Message Templates and Merge Tags for how that works.

What we do with your file

After upload, we handle the cleanup you'd otherwise do by hand: duplicate contacts are removed and phone numbers are normalized into a consistent, carrier-ready format. You don't need to pre-scrub the file.

Your finished lists appear on the Audiences page, which is read-only — that's by design, since edits to a live sending list are a compliance risk. If you see a page noting that lists are managed by PolitiFast, that's the expected state, not an error. When something in a list needs to change, upload a corrected file or ask the team.

One more thing we handle automatically: opted-out contacts are excluded from every send. If someone replied STOP last month, they will not receive your next message even if they're still sitting in your uploaded file. You never maintain a suppression list yourself.

What PolitiFast is not

PolitiFast is not a general CRM. Lists exist here for one purpose: powering your text sends. There's no donor tracking, call logging, or relationship pipeline — if you run those elsewhere, keep running them there and send us exports when it's time to text. Keeping the tool focused is what lets us guarantee the compliance side, like automatic opt-out exclusion, without exceptions.

Once your list is up, the next step is writing the message — start with Creating Message Templates and Merge Tags, then submit through the wizard covered in Submitting a Text: The Six-Step Wizard.