1. Import your invitees from the Attendees of other events when you want to invite only participants who registered for those other events.
  2. Import your invitees from the Invitees of other events when you want to invite participants who were invited to those other events (but who did not necessarily register for them).

For more information on how data propagates and syncs among the various collections in GEVME, see the article Collections in GEVME.

Propagation Rules

When importing invitees from Attendees or Invitees of other events:

  1. Existing records in your Invitees collection will be updated (if their corresponding data in the source is different).
  2. The corresponding contact records of the updated invitees will not be updated.

Thus, consider the scenario where you have the following setup:



When the import is performed, the results will be as follows, where the invitee records will be created in Event A:



If the attendee record is now updated in Event B, and then imported again, then the corresponding invitee record in Event A will be updated:


Resulting into this:



Matching by ID VS Matching by Email

Matching by ID

When importing from Attendees or Invitees of other events, a unique link will be created between the record created in the target and its source. To subsequently update your records in your target again (importing from the same source), choose the Match records based on ID option when importing (see the section XXX below for where this option is found).

Thus, continuing from the example above, after the importn, the invitee records in Event A will have a unique link to their corresponding attendee records in Event B:



This means that if you then import from Attendees of a third event (Event C), where there's another (updated) record of Peter Mark and do the matching by ID again, the import will not be successful, because:

  • There's no link between the invitee Peter Mark in Event A and the attendee Peter Mark in Event C.

A new Peter Mark record will also not be created in invitees of Event A because:

  • The email address field in Invitees of Event A is set to have unique values.

To illustrate this therefore, this means that the following import will fail:



Matching by Email

If you want to update the invitee record of Peter Mark in Event A with the attendee record of Peter Mark in Event C, do the import but match the records based on email address (provided the email address field is set to have unique values in invitees of Event A), or by any other field which has been set to have unique values.

Therefore, if you do this:



The Peter Mark record in invitees of Event A will then be updated:



Importing Invitees From Attendees or Invitees of Other Events

To import invitees from the Attendees or Invitees of other events, follow these steps:

1. Click on Invitees in the left-hand navigation.



2. If you don't have any invitee, you will see the following screen:



Click on the Import Invitees button.

3. If, however, you already have invitees, you will see the invitees grid:



In that case, click on the Import button in the grid toolbar.

4. STEP 1 - Choose your import source
This will open the Import Invitees wizard popup.



5. Click on the Import from Attendees or Invitees of other events button then click on the Next button.

6. STEP 2 - Configurations
This will bring up the Configurations screen:



The settings and options on this screen are:

  1. Import from
    Choose Attendees (or Invitees, as the process would be the same) from the dropdown. 
  2. Match records based on
    This option allows you to choose which field to use to match your records between your import target (in this case Invitees) and your import source (in this case Attendees) during the import. The values under this option are the following:

    1. Attendee ID
    By default, this option will always be there. The Attendee ID is a unique system-generated number which will be used to link the record between the target and the source. For more information on this, see the section Matching by ID VS Matching by Email above.

    2. Any field with unique values
    Any other fields with unique values in your Attendee form will also be listed in the dropdown, e.g. by default, the Email field. 
  3. If duplicate records are detected
    This option allows you to choose the action to take when matching records are found between the source and the target. The possible settings under this option are:

    1. Update with new information
    This option will update the information of the matching record in the target destination (if the information is different from the source).

    2. Skip
    This option will not update the information of the matching record in the target destination. 
  4. If duplicate records are detected
    This option allows you to choose the action to take when matching records are found between the source and the target. The possible settings under this option are:

    Choosing Yes for this option will add the imported records to a static list of your choice immediately after they are imported. 
  5. Click on the Next button

7. STEP 3 - Choose your list

This will bring up the List(s) Selection screen.



(1) Start by selecting the event from which you want to import.



(2) Once you've selected an event, the lists under that event will be loaded. Choose the list(s) that you want to import by clicking on the Choose button.



(3) Once you've chosen your list(s), click on the green Choose list(s) button to proceed to the next step.



8. STEP 4 - Match your columns & import your records

This will bring you to the Matching Columns screen.



This step allows you to match the fields in your invitees form to their corresponding fields in the Attendees collection from which you are importing. By default, GEVME will smartly read the field names and do the matching, but you can of course override this decision and do the matching manually.


Fields for which GEVME cannot find a match will be marked as "Will not be imported", for example, the Country field in the screenshot below:



To do the matching manually, simply select the field from the dropdown. For example, if your country fields was called Origin in the Attendee form, select it from the dropdown:



Note: The field name of each field is shown in brackets next to it.


This will then match the Country field in your invitee form to the Origin field in the Attendee form:



9. Once you are satisfied with the matching, click on the Import records button.



10. STEP 5 - Results of import

After the import, you will be presented with the Results of import screen.



On this screen will be reported the following:

  1. The number of records in your source.
  2. The static list to which the records were added (if applicable).
  3. The number of records added.
  4. The number of records updated (or skipped, based on the setting that you chose in Step 2).
  5. The number of records which could not be imported.

    Note: For the records which were added, updated or which could not be imported, click on the respective links to get more details.