Sending out joining instructions and attendees list

Shortly before the lecture, we email out joining instructions and a list of attendees together with location and contact details. This can be used for lift sharing.  The procedure below has been verified as working on a Mac using Numbers.  Your experience using Excel on a PC may differ.

Some days ahead of sending out the joining instructions:

  1. Log on to MailChimp
  2. Find a recent ‘Joining Instructions’ campaign from a previous year and replicate it.
  3. Edit the joining instructions to what is required this year.
  4. Add Draft to the headings.
  5. You can send this out to Organisers only for review and as a test.

A week before the lecture:

  1. Go to the bookings [Dashboard>Events>Bookings].  Select the lecture event and view the list of bookings
  2. Clean up as needed.  Some people do not bother to capitalise their names or their location, which shows up in a list of attendees etc.  There may be inconsistency in the location people give, such as some including their county for well know cities while others do not. You can edit the booking details to fix this.
  3. Set the filter to just show Confirmed bookings, or if wanting to include pending bookings you will need to show all but remove cancellation ones at steps 6 & 8 below.
  4. Using the CSV icon, export a CSV list of the bookings.    You need to include the separate forename and surname fields, the combined names, , email address, location and ‘Include me in participants list’ field.
  5. Open the exported list in a spreadsheet application.
  6. Delete the first three rows, which contain details of the venue etc. and convert the new Row 1  to be a header row.
  7. Sort the table on Surname then First Name.
  8. Log on to MailChimp.
  9. Replicate the draft joining instructionss campaign and remove Draft from the name.
  10. Select the Audience section.
  11. To back up the existing MailChimp list,  Click on View Contacts and then   Export Audience. This may download immediately.You will be sent an email when the export file is ready for download.
  12. If the backup list has not down-loaded, click on the link in the email to download your backup of the existing list.
  13. Create a Group for this year
  14. Select Add contacts > Import Contacts and choose CSV format.
  15. Select the .csv file you prepared and match the file fields to the fields in the mailing list for name and email address.
  16. At the next screen, select to add the new records to the Group for this lecture year and attended and also sign-up consent of Event registration.
  17. Select Update Contacts
  18. We are not using tags – skip
  19. Import the list of attendees.
  20. View the group for this year and check the number of members matches the bookings and that it looks right.
  21. Return to the spreadsheet to prepare the shared participants list
  22. Sort on Include me in participants list field.
  23. Delete all rows where participant has not included permission
  24. Sort remaining rows on Surname then First Name.
  25. Delete all columns except Name (the combined name), email address and location.
  26. Change the heading of Your location to Location
  27. Fix the fill colours so that no column is coloured and then the header row is green in the MFL style.
  28. Select the entire table and copy it and paste into place in the joining instructions in MailChimp.
  29. You can now send out the joining instructions to this year’s attendees group.

[This procedure tested September 2021 using Apple Numbers and Apple Mail.]

« Refunds and cancellations

Sending out a Zoom link »