Export contacts for a mail merge or holiday cards
Export a sphere as one row per household, with flattened addresses, ready for a mail merge or address labels.
Send a holiday card, an invitation, or any mailed piece to a whole sphere, without sending two copies to the same house or reformatting addresses by hand.
Why it matters
Reaching everyone in a sphere by mail is worth doing, once a year or for a specific occasion. What makes it a chore is the cleanup: two people in the same household both getting a card, or an hour spent copying addresses into a label template one at a time. A mailing export handles both problems in one pass.
How it works
Instead of one row per contact, this export groups a couple or household into a single row, so you're not sending duplicate mail to the same address. Each part of the address — street, city, state, zip — comes out as its own column, so it drops straight into a mail-merge template or a label maker without any reformatting on your end.
How to use it
- Filter first: on the Database page, filter down to the sphere you want to mail, such as your holiday card list. Skipping this step means the export includes everyone in your network, not just that sphere.
- Start the export and choose the mailing option: look for the household or mailing mode when you start the export.
- Download the file once you get the completion email.
- Run the mail merge: open the file in whatever tool you're using. In Google Sheets, use the Mail Merge add-on with Google Docs; in Word, use the built-in Mail Merge wizard; for printed labels, most label tools accept a CSV directly. Map the address columns from the file to the fields your template expects.
Good to know
- Household grouping relies on related contacts you've linked as a couple or partners, so link them first if you want one card per household. See Link related contacts.
- Addresses come out flattened into separate columns (street, city, state, zip), which is what most mail-merge tools expect.
- This is the same export as Export your contacts to a spreadsheet, with the mailing option turned on — filter to the right sphere before you run it.
- Anyone without a saved address won't produce a usable row for mail, so it's worth a quick scan of the file before you print anything.