Topic:

I have a mailing list of people who I’d like to invite to my event. I’d like to compare that list to the attendees who’ve registered for my event, so that I can follow up with those people who haven’t yet registered. How can I do that?

Solution:

This is a perfect job for the RegOnline RSVP functionality! But since you asked this question (or are viewing this posting) let’s assume that it wasn’t implemented for this event. If you did use RSVP for this event. If you didn’t, don’t worry… all is not lost.

RegOnline has an Excel spreadsheet template designed specifically for the purpose of comparing a mailing list to your event attendees. This spreadsheet, while not as simple as RSVP, cross-checks the email address and name on a mailing list with the people who have registered for your event. In order to use this spreadsheet, you’ll need to have a total of three Excel spreadsheets – your mailing list of invitees, a list of those people who’ve registered for your event, and a template spreadsheet to compare the two and determine who has not yet registered.

First, you’ll need to do a bit of prep work.

• Open your mailing list of invitees and make sure that all records have an email address. 
• Download the comparison template Excel spreadsheet to your PC. 
• Create a mailing list of the people who are already registered for your event. To do so:
  1. Sign on to RegOnline, click on RegMail in the left side folder list, and then click Mailing Lists.
  2. Click the Create a New Mailing List button. The Create Mailing List window displays.
  3. Make the following entries:
     • List Name – The name for this mailing list
     • List Type – Select Event Attendees from the dropdown list; when this option is selected, a new tab titled Events displays in this window.
  4. Click the Apply button, then click the Events tab.
  5. Select your event from the Available Events (left) column, then click the right arrow button (>) to add it to the Chosen Events column. 
  6. Click OK to save your list and return to the Mailing Lists screen. Your new list is added to the mailing lists shown in this window.
  7. Find your mailing list and click the Download icon. At the second prompt click the Download Now button to download your list. Save the list to your PC so we can use it in the next step.

Now you should have two Excel-based mailing lists – your list of invitees, and a list of people who actually have registered for this event so far. In addition, you’ll also need the mailing list comparison template file.

Now that you have all the information, let’s take a quick look at the mailing list comparison template. You’ll see that there are five columns in this file – three for your invitee mailing list (email, first name, last name), one for the email address of the individuals who have registered for the event, and a column that shows whether this person is registered for the event.

To use the mailing list comparison template to see who still needs to register for your event:

1. Open the comparison template file and your mailing list file.
2. In your mailing list file, click and drag from the first email address to the last one and click Copy (Ctrl-C).
• Note that if you also want to copy the first and last name to the template file, drag across those columns and copy them as well.
3. In your template file, click in the first empty cell in the Column A (header says “Email from my mailing list of invitees”) and click Paste (Ctrl-V). All of the email addresses are added to the template file. If you copied the first/last names, paste those into columns B and C, respectively, in the template file.
4. Now close your mailing list file and open your list of event attendees. (Keep the template file open.)
5. Copy the email address from your event attendees file to column D (header says “Email that was used to register for this event”) in the template file.
6. Close your list of event attendees.
7. Check the entry in column E of the template file (“Invitee has NOT registered”). Where the value in this column reads TRUE, this attendee has not registered for your event. You can now send a follow-up email to just those people.

Additional Information:

None.

Related Links:

• How does the RegOnline RSVP functionality work?   
• How do I create a list of people who have attended my event(s)?
• User's Guide - RegMail – Create a New Mailing List 

Keywords:  rsvp, respond, response, reply, attendees, registered, compare, comparison, invitees, invited, invitation, list, lists, mailing list, responses