Contact Ownership lets you assign a member or members of your team as the Contact Owner(s) for each contact in Safari Portal. This can help teams organize their contact database, clarify who manages each relationship, and support permissions around who can view or edit different contacts.
Safari Portal can automatically assign Contact Owners when new contacts are created, or you can assign and update owners manually or in bulk.
How Contact Owners are automatically assigned
How an owner is assigned depends on how the contact was created.
Contacts created manually
When you manually create a new contact, Contact Owner defaults to you.
You can change the Contact Owner to another member of your team before saving the contact.
Contacts created through a Form linked to a File
If a new contact is created from a Form associated with a File, Safari Portal assigns the Contact Owner based on the team members already associated with that File:
- Sales Consultant — if the File has a Sales Consultant or Consultants, they become the Contact Owner.
- File Owner — if there is no Sales Consultant, the File Owner becomes the Contact Owner.
Contacts created through a standalone Form
If a Form isn't associated with a File, new contacts created through that Form are assigned to the team member who generated the Form link.
Assigning Contact Owners when importing contacts
You can also assign Contact Owners when importing contacts into Safari Portal.
If your spreadsheet already contains ownership information, map the appropriate column to Contact Owner during the import.
Alternatively, you can choose to assign all of the contacts in an import to a specific team member.
Safari Portal does not automatically make the person performing the import the Contact Owner. This is intentional, since contacts are often imported by an administrator or another team member who isn't responsible for those relationships.
If you don't map a Contact Owner or choose an owner during the import, the imported contacts will have no Contact Owner.
Assigning Contact Owners in bulk
Need to update a larger number of contacts? You don't have to edit them individually.
From the Contacts module, select the contacts you want to update and use the bulk action to Assign Contact Owner.
You can assign the selected contacts in three ways:
- Specific Team Member(s) — assign all selected contacts to the same team member(s).
- Most Recent File Owner — assign each contact to the File Owner on their most recent File.
- Most Recent Sales Consultant — assign each contact to the Sales Consultant on their most recent File.
The last two options are particularly helpful if you already have a large contact database and want to establish ownership based on your team's existing Files.
What happens to existing contacts?
Safari Portal will not automatically assign owners to your existing contacts.
Instead, you can use the bulk assignment options above to determine how ownership should be assigned.
Changing a Contact Owner
You can change the Contact Owner on an individual contact at any time from their Contact Profile.
Contact Ownership and permissions (coming soon!)
Contact Ownership can also be used alongside your team's Contact permissions to control which contacts different users can access.
Depending on their permissions, team members can be configured to:
- View and edit all contacts
- View all contacts, but only edit contacts they own
- Only view and edit contacts they own
This can be particularly useful for larger teams where individual consultants manage their own client relationships while managers or administrators need visibility across the entire contact database.
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