Import Participants
 | Use this feature to post event registrations from other sources
This feature allows you to quickly post event registrations to CiviCRM that have come in offline or through another event registration system. However, each person, household or organization must already exists as a contact record in your CiviCRM database. If you need to import participant information for contact records which haven't been added to CiviCRM yet - you will do this in 2 steps. First, use Import Contacts to add the contact records. If possible, include a unique 'External ID' for each new contact which you can then use to match participant info such as event registration to the corresponding contact record. Then you can proceed with importing the event registration records using this feature. |
You access the Import Participants function by clicking CiviEvent on the CiviCRM home page. There are four items underneath the CiviEvent menu - Find Participants, Manage Events, New Event and Import Participants.
Click on Import Participants to go to the Import Participants screen. You will see the Import Participants form.
Save the CSV file you want to import to your local hard drive (or an accessible drive on your network) before you continue.
 | Import file requirements
- The file must be in the 'comma-separated-values' format (CSV) and UTF8 encoded. Most applications will allow you to export records in this format. Consult the documentation for your application if you're not sure how to do this. The file must be UTF8 encoded if it contains special characters (e.g. accented letters, etc.).
- The file must include the following columns:
- Event Title OR Event ID (a unique integer assigned by CiviEvent, displayed in the Manage Events listing)
- Participant Status (ie. Registered, Attended, Cancelled, etc.)
- Participant Role (ie. Attendee, Volunteer, Host, etc.)
Valid values for Status and Role can be found in the CiviEvent section of the Administer CiviCRM screen. You can also import Fee Level, Registration Date and any other standard or custom Participant fields.
- The size of the file MUST be less than 1MB. If your file is larger, separate the data into multiple smaller files as needed.
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Sometimes you want to upload new contacts and event registrations associated with them. Other times you may want to upload updated information about specific event registrations. Below are the fields that will help you make those associations.
- If you choose "On Duplicate Entry - Update" you will be able to match by 'Participant ID', which is a unique ID number assigned when a participant is registered for an event. The most typical use for this function is to update an existing batch of registrations by (1) Downloading existing registrations as a CSV file, (2) Editing them, (3) Re-importing the edited registrations through Participant Import using the 'Participant ID' field as the match.
- If you choose "On Duplicate Entry - Skip" or "On Duplicate Entry - No Duplicate Checking" you can match the new event registrations to existing contacts using a combination of these fields:
- Contact ID - CiviCRM's internal ID number for the contact
- External Identifier - a unique ID that you can create for each contact by including the External Identifier field in your Contact Import
- First name, last name, and email address - if you include these fields in the Participant Import they will be used to match contacts with the Event Registrations you are importing
| How to import new registrations from outside of CiviCRM
The most common use of Import Participants is to upload event registrations that have been received from some source outside CiviCRM. To do that type of import, you need to import the list of registrations twice:
- Import Contacts.
- You can include an External ID field for each record (unique for each contact) to make sure it is correctly associated with the Event Registration that will be imported in Step 2.
- If you don't include an External ID you can still match records by some combination of first name, last name, email address, and CiviCRM's internal Contact ID (if you know and have recorded the Contact ID for each participant)
- Import Event Participants
- Choose "On Duplicate Entry - Skip" or "On Duplicate Entry - No Duplicate Checking"
- On the "Match Fields" screen choose the fields you want to use to match the contacts with the Event Registration. In the drop-down box, these fields (Contact ID, First Name, Last Name, Email, External Identifier) are all listed as "(match to contact)".
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There are 4 steps in the Import Members process:
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