Uploading CSV files of event attendance to update primary records

[Caroline_Bauer]

Hello! We use Airtable primarily as a CMS for our design Studio. Our base has several tables, one of them is “Studio Participants,” where we attempt to record every time a Participant has engaged with our services. We keep track of these engagements as separate tables, where we are currently manually adding each participant to each event in the event table, and linking that record to the person in the Studio Participant table.

We’re hoping to use the Blocks feature to create a workflow where we could upload attendance lists as CSVs to eliminate the manual matching. Anyone have recommendations for how to do this?

[JonathanBowen]

Hi @Caroline_Bauer - the trick with this is to make the Participant “key” field also be a link field in the Engagements table:

Here I’ve used email address as the key field as this is unique, most people have them and most can quote or type it when “checking in” to an engagement.

In the engagements table you could have this:

So, if you entered a new row manually, you would choose an existing participant record in the Email field.

You CSV file might look something like this:

Email,Date
jim@example.com,2019-09-20
jane@example.com,2019-09-28
john@example.com,2019-10-01

In the CSV Import block, you can map the email column to the Email field:

When the file imports, the link is made by AT in the background. If you present an email in the CSV file that doesn’t yet exist in the Participants table, it will also create it there (as well as making the link).

As a separate thing (and I’m not sure if I’ve understood your description correctly), it sounds like you’ve got separate tables for different events/engagements. Generally, I would recommend not having separate tables, but just have a single table with a “type” field or a link to a parent Events table.

JB

[Brenda_Ginsberg]

Hello and happy holidays, I posted a question that is also about emails and AirTable. Anyone from this wonderful group have input? I’d be so appreciative. Connecting Email and AirTable