Shaun Whynacht shows how to split a full name into separate first and last name fields in Keap using PlusThis tools and Zapier. When SurveySparrow sends a full name in the first name field, a webhook triggers automation that parses it into distinct fields, then adds a placeholder if no last name exists to satisfy PandaDoc requirements.
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Have you ran into the instance where your integration is putting the first and last name value into the first name field in Keep? How do you get around that? Well, in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how I overcame that using +this. Now here's the use case. We are driving people into the application with a survey. We're actually using SurveySparrow. SurveySparrow has a field called name. Some people put in their first name, some people put in their full name, but we need to be able to split that out. There are two tools that I'm going to show you from PlusThis, which is going to be the Set Field tool and the Split Name tool. Why do we do this? Why didn't we just keep it in there? It's because our endpoint for this instance is going to be PandaDoc. PandaDoc requires a last name field value when you are triggering it through Zapier. So let's take a look at this. One little thing that I do with all applications that I'm working in is I create a campaign that is just my global automations campaign. In here, I have little one-off type of tasks, like using PlusThis or Zapier, that are just single things. So I don't have to rebuild them over and over again in the other campaigns. Now, this section here, I have a tag called trigger split name. Very simple. I like to use the word trigger because trigger implies something's going to happen and I want to split that name. It's not going to stick around. We're going to remove it in the first step anyway. So it's just there to fire this. This comes over here and then it runs a webhook and then it removes that tag. So that tag gets removed right away. So it could be reused and it also doesn't need to stick around. Let's go over and look at Plusifs. So the first thing we're going to do is the Split Name. Now this is a fairly simple tool to set up. If you have plus this, it basically says what's the source field. In this case, it's going to be first name because the first name and last name may be in there. And then what's the destination? It's going to parse them out into two separate ones. They do have the option here for middle name and suffix for the, for the contact, but 99% of the times people are going to just put in their first and last name. And then I just give it a name down here. It does then give us a webhook that we can go ahead and utilize later. The next set of tools is the Set Field tool. Now, why would I want to set the field? Here's the case: if I go ahead and put in the first name into the field that says Name, it's not going to have a last name in there to split out. So in that case, what I'm doing is I have a secondary step here. So once it goes and splits the name, it's going to wait a minute, and then I have a decision diamond here that is looking at the values again, and it's saying for no change, if the contact's last name is not empty, which means a value got filled in there, then don't change anything. But if the contact's last name is still empty after it ran the split, then I want to run that second tool to add a value in there. And essentially all that's doing is I have a value, and you can put anything you want in here that says no name and puts in the last name field, right? Um, you know, I could go and do this if I want, just so that doesn't have another space in there., which I'll probably do. I'll just save that. So there's the webhook and then it goes in there. The reason I did this second step, and it may not apply to you or your use case, is I still know that it is still going to push it over to PandaDoc. And even though in PandaDoc we don't merge in their first name or their, their last name, sorry, into any of the documents that we're sending. Now, if it's a contract, you might want to, but we're sending out a report and we're just addressing them by their last name. Then we'd go ahead and push over that no name part of it into the system. So that is essentially why we've set that up. Now, when we go ahead and we go back to our other campaigns, we are actually running that last name validation first. So we're doing the opt-in tag, and then we're doing a split saying, does the last name have a value? If it does, then don't apply this tag. If it doesn't, then we need to apply this tag. So that is how we use that. Hopefully you found this useful. If you have any questions or comments, throw it in below the video. I'd be happy to answer those for you. And if you have any other questions not even related to this but maybe related to Keep, I'd be happy to answer those as well. And like and subscribe to this video. Be happy to give you more value. Thanks for watching.
