How to Import Contacts and Track Past Event Participation

Overview

This article outlines some best practices for how to import contacts to track past event participation (when tracked outside of Kindful).

Linked Articles:

- Custom Contact Fields

- Convert Text Custom Fields into Select Custom Fields

- Preparing Your Data for Import

- Using the Import Data Tool

When You Would Use This

Before starting to use Kindful, or even while using Kindful to manage your donors and online donations, you may have used an external solution for an event you hosted.

Let's say you hosted a virtual 5K and now want to import all the registrations and earmark those contacts as a participant in the event. You may also have plans to do a separate import for the actual transaction since a single person often pays for multiple registrations.

How to Track Past Event Participation

In this case, we recommend doing a "Contacts Only" import for to create all registrants.

Include a custom contact field to track the event participant data. These fields are always exportable, and can even be filterable if configured as Select values. In order to be able to filter on this information, you can convert the field to a "Select" type in Kindful after it's been imported. 

After these participants have been imported, follow-up with a Transactions import to show the ticket purchases. The transactions will append to the existing contacts as long as the first name, last name, and email address match exactly. 

If you need guidance on importing data, see the Linked Articles in the Overview section at the top of this article.

How to Filter For and Report On It 

You can filter for those who registered for these events if and when you convert the field to a "Select" type in Kindful after it's been imported. You can find these participants by using the filter title that matches the name of your "Select" type custom field. Then, use the name of the particular event to show the results.

Additionally, you can export this data as a column on your spreadsheet when creating a report. This can be valuable information to have post-filtering for these participants. It is also beneficial if you export a larger list of contacts and want to know any event for which they had been marked as "Registered for Event". This is especially helpful to use if you do not convert your custom fields from text to select values.