The connector between Goodword's contact table and research system was broken. I repaired it.
The team used Airtable to organize contact records and Dovetail to keep research notes. A selected contact needed to move from the first system into the second without somebody entering the same information twice.
The workflow depended on a checkbox. When the record was ready, the checkbox marked it for transfer. The connector looked up the contact, created or updated the research record, and preserved enough identity information to connect later notes to the right person.
I tested the update with one record before allowing a larger set to move. That check confirmed that the field existed, the lookup returned the intended record, and the write changed only the selected state.
Matching was the harder part. Names alone were not reliable because two people could share a name or the same person could appear under different versions of it. An email address provided a stronger match when it was available.
The private source includes real contact information, field identifiers, scripts, and service credentials. None of that is included here. This article does not publish the number of records matched or the people represented in either system.
The public-safe event is the repaired path. A research contact could be selected in the working table and appear in Dovetail with the basic information needed for future interviews and notes.
The connector also logged its work so a failed transfer could be identified without silently losing the record. That mattered because the two systems continued to serve different purposes.
The original table remained unchanged except for the transfer state used by the workflow.
Once the contact-sync problem was fixed, I posted the update. The next step was to let the team use the checkbox deliberately and verify that the research records arrived in the expected place.