Importing data

Import attendees from CSV files to bulk create or update invitations or tickets. This can be useful for sending invitations in batches, for migrating from other systems, for adding comp tickets, or batch registration.

You can import into two main sections: Invitations, and Attendees.

Invitations are added to your event, but sending the batch is done in a separate step.

Attendees are created immediately.

"Import" is available in the dropdown in each of the Invitations and Attendees sections.

Upload or paste

If you have a CSV file ready to go, you can drag it to the Upload box on the import screen. Alternatively, you can paste data into the textarea in the Paste tab. Pasted data can be in CSV or TSV format. You can also simply paste the contents of a CSV file.

Typically for imports you would include first_name, last_name, and email, but none of the fields are strictly required. You can add names without emails, and emails without names.

The first row must contain the header rows or your import will fail. The header rows don't have to exactly match the field names, but they have to be convertible. e.g. your header row could be First name, Last Name, Email which would work, but first,last,e-mail would not.

After you import the file, your import is staged for you to review. If there are any validation errors, they'll be shown at this point and you will have to fix the errors and re-import.

Upserting

Once you have imported data into IO, every record gets a unique ID within the system. You can use this ID to update records in batch later. To quickly get the IDs of the records you imported, you can Export your data and include the ID field. You can then re-import that data, and as long as the ID field is present, you will update the existing records, rather than create new records.

Custom fields

You can include custom fields in your imports and upserts. The field header should match the Custom field's slug, but just like other headers, if the slug is e.g. company_name, your header can be Company name.

Ticket type

If you have multiple ticket types, you will need to include the "Ticket type" / ticket_type header in your CSV file. Use the ticket type’s unique slug to identify the ticket type that you’d like to associate with the invitation or attendee you are importing.

Encoding

To prevent encoding issues, we recommend exporting your CSV with UTF-8 encoding to handle special characters correctly.

Handling duplicates

IO currently identifies duplicates by email once they are in the system, but it does not prevent the importing of duplicates. If you have duplicates in your data, we recommended de-duplicating before uploading.