Workflow to send a batch of contacts - Questions about Get Details of Contact & Lists

I have people reach out to me seeking referrals for attorneys who can help them with a case when I am not able to. I’m usually on iOS when I need to do this, and it’s been the bane of my existence. I either have to cut and paste a whole bunch of contact fields, or send individual emails with vcards. The cut-and-paste approach takes forever. The vcard method is not effective, because then the recipient has to get several separate emails with contact info. Worse, the vcard often sends information that I like to keep in contact cards, but don’t want to share with others and I know of no way to choose what goes in the vcard.

So, I sat with Workflow and was determined to put something together that would solve this problem. My workflow performs well enough to reduce my effort by at least 85%. But I would like to make it better. I have two questions.

  1. One of the things I’d like to do is grab a particular phone number, a particular e-mail address, etc., but as far as I can tell using the Get Details of Contacts retrieves all the phone numbers, all the e-mail addresses, etc. Is there a way to do this more granularly? It’s simple enough to delete the extra phone numbers in the e-mail, but I’d rather avoid that if I could. Any ideas?

  2. I’m not sure I’m capturing the information in the most efficient way. The workflow takes a contact, stores that in a variable, captures each piece of information and stores those in variables, then I put those variables into a list and use the combine text action to package the information together and send it to the clipboard. It’s there a better way or is this the correct approach?

Thanks, everyone. I’m so grateful for this forum and all the great ideas and answers I’ve already gotten.

I created this sample workflow to show techniques that may be useful to you. You should be able to build off of this.

Glad to answer any questions. I hope this helps — jay

3 Likes

This is tremendously helpful. It’s perfect, actually, and exactly what I needed. Thanks @jayelevy!

This is great! I had this same problem. Anyone else find that when searching in contacts picker that you can’t escape to actually select the contact? I always have to use the radio button / checkmark. Thanks again for the workflow!

I experience that same issue with searching contacts.

:+1:t3: Glad it was useful for you