Most event marketers are sitting on goldmines of guest information, not to mention have genius ideas for how they'd like to organize guest lists.

The sad reality? Most of them don't have a tool for effectively organizing contacts. That means they're spending precious planning time in spreadsheet purgatory rather than working on a million other things.

Splash concept #1: There is tremendous upside to uploading a well-organized list to Splash: we will immediately reward you with the superhuman abilities to report on your list and email its members with unprecedented precision. 

Splash concept #2: Within your Splash guest list, you can further organize and reorganize guests with a high level of sophistication, curating lists and applying tags like a certified G.

Let's review some Power Moves

Step 1: For any event you're about to execute, think about all the ways you'd like to be able to report on, organize, and segment your list for communication.

Some examples:

• Are your Sales Reps going to be bugging you for updates on which of their prospects have RSVP'd?
• Do you need to assign your guests a seating arrangement? 
• Do you need to report on RSVPs by company, job title, industry, or location?
• Do you need to keep tabs on VIP responses?
• Would you like to send your invitations from a custom "From" name?

The possibilities for supreme organization are endless!

Step 2: Next, pop every guest into a spreadsheet and create a column for everything you identified above.

Let's do one together!

In our sample event, we have a few special objectives:

1. We'd like to report on our guest list by Sales Rep and send each guest a personalized invitation on behalf of their Sales Rep.
   
   
2. Each guest who attends will be sent a special, one-time promo code.
   
   
3. Our check-in staff needs us to pre-assign every guest a Table #. They also need to be aware of VIPs, as do our executives.
   
   
4. We need to report on our event RSVPs by Company, Job Title, and the guest's industry.
   
   Color coded for clarity in the below spreadsheet, you can see how we are using a variety of strategic column types:
   
   
   
   • Contact fields (dark blue) - Standard guest information that Splash stores on an event- and contact-level.
   
   • Lists and Tags (purple) - Lists are bits of information specific to this event (i.e. Table and VIP status) and Tags are ways we want to always classify people (i.e. industry or career level). 
   
   Power move: You can assign guests to multiple lists and tags by comma separating them, as we are doing above for Table and VIP list designations. 
   
   • Custom Fields (pink) -  These work like lists — you can use them to filter your guest list in extremely useful ways — but they are special because you can dynamically insert them into your Splash emails. 

Step 3: Export your meticulously organized spreadsheet to a CSV file - this will enable you to pop it into Splash.

Step 4: Next, in what can only be described as a ninja move, we're going to do something sneaky!

So, in order to import custom columns for Sales Rep and Promo Code we need to create custom RSVP form questions to map them to. This will allow us to map the information to our contacts and also insert these fields into email content later on :)

In your event page's Registration Form touchpoint, let's add custom hidden questions for both:

Note: "Hidden" means your guests will not see these questions in your RSVP form!

Step 5: After you save your questions, give your page a good old fashioned refresh.

Step 6: Now, let's go into our Guest List tab and import our CSV file using the Add Guests button.

Splash will automatically recognize and map your columns — if we don't detect an exact match, you can manually map the fields using the drop-downs.

Notice how Sales Rep and Promo Code each have a mate? So satisfying!

Step 7: After you map your columns, you'll be asked to assign your guests a Status. If these are guests who have not been invited or responded yet, the play is to give them "No Status," which means you need to send them an invite.

Power move: If you have guests you'd like to upload with a variety of different statuses — a few yeses, a few noes, and few awaiting replies — you can include a Status column in your spreadsheet!

Step 8: Import your list and behold the magic!

Let's take a look at your guest list after the import completes:

The payoff:

Status: All 33 contacts are filterable by their status. In this example, because the invitations have not been sent yet, everyone's status is "No Status."

My Lists: All of our seating arrangements (for Table) are filterable in the left side-bar along with our VIP list. Splash also auto-created a list with all people from the upload, naming it after your CSV file, allowing us to have records of each import batch.

Custom Fields: Each guest was assigned a Sales Rep and a Promo code, information we can filter our list by (next chapter!) and use to insert into email content. 

Now, you're probably saying to yourself "THIS IS AMAZING!" — and it is. Our event is now supremely organized.

But the real fun starts once we begin using guest information to filter, segment, report, and email.