My goal is to enable my personal contacts (over 10k) the ability for them to update their own contact records. Has anyone been able to accomplish this?
I use Google Contacts, I have a few CRM’s but I am willing to sign up for whatever service I need to in order to pull this off.
In a perfect world, I would send an email and a text (SMS) to all 10k+ contacts with a general update, the purpose of the email and I would have a link they could click to go to a Gravity Form with the information I have on them pre-populated and give them the ability to update any incorrect information or add any information I don’t have.
We do something similar with a WordPress plugin, but this forces me to create a username for each contact and I dont think it will work. I also thought about a low tech way of creating a new MailChimp Audience and using their Update Profile option but that doesn’t give me the flexibility I am really looking for.
Any and all help is much appreciated. If you (or anyone you know) can help I would happily retain them to assist with this project.
You would need to export your users data in a CSV and then use Gravity View import entries plugin to import the CSV data.
Before importing the users data you will need to create a new form and create a user registration feed. The required a Gravity Forms elite license.
On import you can choose the registration form and also the feed you want to trigger, in this case it would be the user registration feed.
After the import if all goes well, you will need to create a new form. In this form you will need to add the user merge tags to each field. This can be done by clicking the field and then in the advanced tab click populate dynamically. Then for each field you need to add the custom user meta merge tag.
For example in the email field you would add {user:user_email}
Follow suit for all other applicable fields.
Lastly, create an update user feed for the new form you created. This will allow the users to be updated on submit.
You mentioned Mailchimp. If going that route you could likely map old/new info via the Gravity Forms Mailchimp add-on to update their contact info as a next step in the workflow. If it happens not to have that exact use case, the outgoing webhook could let you leverage other Mailchimp APIs or do similar with Google Contacts via the Google People API it seems.
This would present a couple of additional benefits:
The import-and-update pattern using the {workflow_entry_link} merge tag would be a one-time activity as the link invalidates after the assigned step is complete (or expired if you were to set that up). You could setup a separate form to ‘update your info in the future’ through a similar pattern. Initial form submission just asking for email address, the generated link sent via email is then providing both validation and access to modify.
If you want to keep a history of requested changes, the entries provide that for you. If you don’t need it, our Form Connector extension has a delete entry step type that could self-delete the entry immediate or after X hours/days/etc.