Contact management in Nimble enables you and your team to stay on top of lead nurturing, follow-up opportunities, email marketing, and sales goals all while operating in a shared contact database. While collaboration among teams is key to success in any business, we understand that being able to reach targeted goals by way of privately managing contacts can be just as beneficial and in some cases necessary.

That is why we've introduced Contact Privacy.

With this new feature, users can now create private and public contacts that can be managed individually, by the account admin and/or the users of an appointed group.

Marking contacts as "private" in the account does exactly that, making these contacts for your eyes only. This way if another user doesn't have permission to see a contact then Nimble will treat it as if that contact does not exist. It will not appear in searches, duplicate checks, etc.

Please note that the account admin has access to all contacts in the database. When you create a Nimble account, you are automatically defaulted as the account admin. As a first step, you can create groups to set default permissions when adding new users to the account.

To start creating groups, take a look at the following: Nimble Privacy Settings - How to Manage Groups

Now in the Permission List, you will see the following options pertaining to contact privacy:

Select these options for the user(s) in the group then when ready, click "Save Changes" at the bottom of the page.

If a user has been set to view and modify all contacts, it will override the setup of the individual user. For example, if user A has uploaded a group of private contacts but the admin has allowed user B to see and edit all contacts, then this would override what user A has set up, and allow user B to see and edit user A's contacts.

In your Contacts tab, you can configure your table settings to see the Privacy Column under your Custom View.

To do this, just click "Configure Table" and choose "Add Field". From here, you can search for "Privacy". The field will appear at the bottom of the list. You can drag it to the top so that it appears at the start of your table columns.

Nimble Tip: Add the "Owner" field by taking the same steps. You can then view this column alongside the "Privacy" column to quickly see who the contact belongs to.

To update the ownership and privacy field for an individual contact, use the inline editing feature by selecting one of the options from the drop-down list.

For Privacy, you will see the following options:

Shared with everyone - Anyone on your account can view and edit

Private to owner - Only the contact owner can view and edit

Viewable to everyone - Anyone on your account can view

Custom privacy - Specific people or groups can view and/or edit

To update the ownership and privacy field for a select group of contacts, simply choose the contacts then select "Action". You will then see the options to apply contact ownership and privacy changes in bulk.

In the bottom right-hand corner, a message will display stating the following when completed: "Privacy operation on ### contacts has finished.

Click "Update list with changes" to see the modifications.

Nimble Tip: Use Segmentation to locate all contacts that are assigned to you as the Owner. For more details, please take a look at the following support article:

Nimble Segmentation Feature

Be mindful of changing privacy and the contact owner as you may no longer be able to see the contact yourself if you are not the admin or in a group appointed to view all contacts.

If you are the admin or have been granted permission to then contact privacy can also be set on the contact record.

Just visit the contact record and choose from the privacy options.

If the contact has been set to private, then you will not be able to view the contact. However, if the contact has been set to "Viewable to everyone", you will be able to see all details, including information in the Interactions, Data Field, and Social tab.

You will not be able to edit any information with the exception of attaching files to the contact record.

Nimble keeps a log of all changes made to a contact record in Change Log. Just click the 3 dots and choose "Change Log". You will now be able to see when and who on the team made changes to the contact record including changing ownership and privacy.

For more information, take a look at the following: Nimble's Change Log Feature
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When creating a new contact, Nimble now provides the option to set an owner and privacy upon creation.

To start, visit your Contacts tab and click "Add Person" or "Add Company". At the top of the contact form, you will see the option to choose the contact owner and who the contact is shared with.

When uploading a CSV file, you will have the option to set your privacy option and ownership for all contacts within the file. This will be available on the third page of the import process.

For more information, please take a look at the following: Nimble CSV Import Wizard

If a privacy option is not selected then the contacts will be public by default.

Lastly, you can set a default owner and privacy settings on any new contact form. To do this, just visit Privacy Settings and choose "Default Settings".

You can now choose a user on the account as the default contact owner and determine the privacy level for the new contacts.

When "Creator" is selected the current user will be the contact owner within contacts creation/import.

Users will be able to override default settings on the form itself if needed.

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If you have any questions, please write us at care@nimble.com, initiate a chat from this FAQ, or join one of our Nimble Onboarding and Best Practices sessions, held every weekday at 9 AM PT.
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