Why use this feature? #
First lets explore an example of why this may be useful for your event. Lets say you’d like to have a “My stay” page for your attendees that would list their personalized check in date, check out date, and other hotel information. Whether this information was gathered using the hotel tool during registration or was collected externally, Canapii’s attribute ID feature will do the leg work so you can trust attendees are seeing their unique information.
Before we get into some of the ways you can utilize this functionality for your event, let’s review some key factors about attribute IDs. When using the term “attributes”, we are referring to registration field entries that your attendees input and select during registration. Now you may want to mass import unique data for your attendees that they have not entered during registration. Don’t worry, we will cover how you can do this using our import override feature later in this article.
Managing attributes and their linked attribute id is done via the attributes tab of your event console’s registration page (under step 1 in the left hand sidebar). Once you have navigated to this page you will want to scroll down past the “basic” attributes and locate the Custom attributes section
Custom attributes are a great way to ask tailored questions specific for your event. For example, you can ask registrants what they are most looking forward to or what their top three goals are from attending your event.
How do admins use this feature? #
Now that you’ve had a quick refresher on attributes we can dig into attribute ids and explore how to show your attendees bespoke information when they view certain pages in the platform.
We should think about attribute ids as a placeholder that tells the platform where to pull the unique information from that is tied to the user who is viewing a page or receiving an email. This is similar to how Mailchimp uses merge tags to insert recipient’s unique personal data in an email using placeholders like [firstname], [lastname], [subscribertype] etc.
When creating a custom attribute for registration – or as a field for importing attendees – you will want to scroll down to the bottom of the create form and locate the field labeled Attribute id. See the below example:
Here I have created a registration question and assigned it the unique attribute id (or placeholder) “personaltopgoal”. Now when a user selects their option for this question, I can show the user their selection elsewhere in the platform.
You may be wondering where exactly we can use these placeholders in the platform. The following options are currently optimized for use with attribute ID placeholders:
- Venue (onsite events)
- Resource center
- Badges (onsite events)
- Welcome confirmation emails
- Campaign tool
Now before you go adding your attribute ids all over the platform, you will need to make a few edits to the tag in order for the system to recognize that it is being asked to pull attendee data in from registration. Simply add “custom.” before your attribute id and encase it in curly brackets “{}”.
Following our example given earlier, if I wanted to pull through a user’s answer to the question “What is your top goal….” I would need to add the following placeholder to my page or welcome email:
{custom.personaltopgoal}
Now with this attribute id placeholder I can use it on the pages and emails listed above to give attendees a personalized experience throughout the event. For example, I can add the “personaltopgoal” attribute ID to the event’s welcome email; if an attendee chose “Personal growth” as the answer to the example Top Goal registration question, their welcome email could read “Thanks for your registration to our event, we’re looking forward to working on personal growth together!” to personalize the message.
What about new attendee information? #
Now, of course regurgitating information that an attendee has already given us isn’t the real goal. In most use cases event admins will want to show attendees new and updated information such as when their transfers will arrive to take them to the airport or what meeting room their session is taking place in. Next we will explore how to import attendees or overwrite existing registrations to include new or updated information. Refer to this article on a simple start guide for importing your attendees if you would like to bypass a ticket based registration path.
Lets look at a use case in which you have your attendees registered using a ticket and in which you’ve made hotel reservations for your guests externally and would like to show your attendee’s their hotel information in one of the pages or emails listed previously.
Your first step is to create a custom attribute and unique attribute id for each of the fields you would like to show. For instance you may wish to show:
- hotel check in date
- hotel check out date
- hotel name
- confirmation number
Now that you have created these custom attributes you’ll use the import button on your attendees tab of your event console to import these data points into your registered attendee’s profile.
Create a simple .csv file that includes the following information:
- first name (required)
- last name (required)
- email (required)
- hotel check in date
- hotel check out date
- hotel name
- confirmation number
NOTES:
- First name, last name, and email address are required for every import and are used to ensure correct matching when you are overwriting an existing registration. Only the fields you include other than these basic fields will be updated. The other fields in your attendee’s profile will not be changed unless included in this file.
- Make sure to use the import guide to reference the header names required in your .csv file for the system to import the data into the correct custom attributes that you’ve just created.
TIPS:
- Use the export function to export the existing attendee data into a .csv file and remove all fields or columns you do not wish to update or change. This will give you an easy template to work from when updating the new custom attribute columns that should be now included in your exported csv.
- If you import a blank cell for a user under your new custom attributes column, the data will not pull through blank but will instead show the placeholder code. To avoid this simply create some default wording and apply to those users who may not have applicable data to input into all columns. Something like “not available” “not required” etc. That way the user will see something other than “{custom.attributeid}” .
Once you have your .csv file created, navigate to the attendees tab, select the the import button then choose file. Once the file has loaded in the next preview panel, you will see that an error has been thrown: “email already exists”. Simply select the overwrite existing check box in the lower right of this modal to enable data overwrite.
if any other error is thrown, it will need to be corrected in your .csv file before you are able to continue.
Once your import is complete and you have placed the appropriate attribute id placeholders on your chosen pages or emails, the system will pull the unique attendee data through according to what was imported for the placeholders.
Now you have a fully personalized event platform that will show user’s their unique hotel information in platform pages and emails from Canapii.