Sometimes you might have certain values in a dropdown field that you want to remove in bulk (for example, removing ‘email’ from the ‘contact consent’ field). The easiest way to do this is by bulk updating the records directly from within Beacon, but there are times when you might need to use an import to do this instead. Perhaps the list of people that you want to update was put together outside of Beacon, and now you need to update the records that are already in your account. Here’s a guide on how to do this.

Firstly, it’s important to note that imports are used for setting values, not removing them. With this in mind, you’re going to use your CSV to identify in Beacon which records need updating. This will give you something to filter for, so that you can bulk update from within Beacon. Let's get into it!

To begin, you'll need to create a checkbox field on the record type that you want to make changes to. This will let you use the import to set a value, effectively 'marking' it. This will come in handy later as you'll be able to filter for it! Read more about filtering here.

2. Select that same record type you created the checkbox on for your template. Click Create.

3. Upload your CSV file. Map a column to your record so that you have something to deduplicate by. You only need to map one column - this is the value Beacon will use to mark your records.

4. Use Fixed data to import a value to the checkbox you just created.

4. Run your import. Beacon has now marked all of those records.

5. Filter on your record type for the checkbox being checked. This will bring up all the records you just updated. For example, from the Person record, Remove email consent? = checked.

6. Bulk select all returned records.

7. Select Update records:

8. Select the value that you want to remove from your dropdown field. Make sure you choose the merge option Remove from existing values. Click Update.

And you're done! You can now delete the checkbox field you created earlier, if you no longer want it.

If you don't want to create a custom field to do this, you can instead create a related Task record to use as your data point to filter with.

For example, if you wanted to remove Email from the Contact consent field on some Person records, you may want to create a task related to the person. This way, you can filter for people who have that related task in Beacon, and update them accordingly.

There are two things you want to do here:

2. Create an import template for the Task record.

3. Map the task name to the Name field. Don't set any deduplication values for the Task records - you want multiple records with the same name to be created, one for each record you want to update.

4. Ensure you link the Task record to the record type you want to update, via the Related to field. Here's where you'll want to set your deduplication value. This ensures you're linking the Task to existing records, rather than creating new ones.

5. Import your CSV.

6. Navigate to the record type you want to update. Apply a filter to find your newly created Task records, e.g Related Tasks = 1 and filter for the task name.

7. Bulk update the returned records as above. And you're all done - you've now successfully removed those values!