Contacts
The difference between a lead and a contact, when people get saved automatically, and how to bring them back later.
Leads and contacts are two different things, and the distinction is genuinely useful once you've been running a few months.
Lead versus contact
A lead is a card on a board. It's a live piece of work with a column, an assignee and a conversation. When you're done with it, it leaves the board.
A contact is a person in your organisation's address book. Contacts don't sit in columns and don't need following up. They're who you know.
Lead = someone you're working right now, on one flow
Contact = someone you know, org-wide, across every flow
The same human is usually both: a lead while you're following up, and a contact forever after. Contacts are also what feed the outbound integrations — Mailchimp, Planning Center and Blackbaud all work from contacts, not leads.
Saving leads as contacts automatically
Flow Settings → Contacts has two moments you can hook into:
On flow entry. Everyone who lands on this board is saved as a contact straight away, with whatever tags you specify. Use this when simply reaching out to you is worth remembering.
On conversion. Only people who reach your conversion step are saved, with their own tags. There's also an option to archive them from the flow at the same time — they graduate from your board into your address book in one motion.
Both are off until you turn them on, and both let you apply tags automatically, which is what makes the contact useful later.
Field mapping
Different forms name things differently. One Facebook form says full_name, your website form
says name, another says Your Name. Field Mapping on the same tab tells FoxFlow which
incoming field means what, so a contact ends up with a real first name, email and phone
instead of a bag of unlabelled answers.
There's an Auto-Detect Fields button that guesses from what's already come in, which handles most cases. Check its guesses once and save.
Tags
Tags are plain lowercase words kept in one list for your whole organisation — see Tags. Same tag, same meaning, every flow.
They're applied automatically by the settings above, by tags on entry on a step, or by hand on any lead or contact. And they're what automations and integrations react to.
Bringing people back
On the organisation's Contacts page there's a Re-Engage action. Pick a tag, pick a flow, and everyone carrying that tag becomes a fresh lead on that board.
This is how a dormant list turns back into work:
There's also Add to Flow for pushing a hand-picked selection onto a board.
Next: Forms.