Let's have a look at Events in Dynamics Marketing

Sometimes I forget to blog so here goes with one that will start a series on Dynamics Marketing Events.

For the past 3 years, we have run Scottish Summit's marketing using other ISV platforms and wanted to go all-in on Dynamics Marketing after seeing what it can actually do.

What use is a system without any pre-existing data? I took a backup of all data from our previous Dynamics system and thought it would be easy enough to just pop that data back into the new tables........... This was a bit of a lack of planning really.

So from the existing Dynamics 365, I exported

Leads, Contacts, Accounts,  Events, and Event Participants. 

The next step was just to import the data and I am ready to go right? Well kind off

So in true Mark fashion once I started I couldn't really put it down until I was satisfied.

Now, remember my sources were the previous Dynamics? Well, that escalated quickly. We added in data from Sessionize & Eventbrite and broke it down a little more

We now have the following data sources

Dynamics - Contacts, Accounts & Leads.

Sessionize - Speakers, Sessions & Events.

Eventbrite - Event Participants.

The logistic import order is

1. Accounts
2. Contacts
3. Leads

This was stage 1. I did a little prep work and ran a dedupe on contacts by emails address and will be using the email address as the matching criteria for everything............

We then move onto the events and content around them

1. Events - Easy went in like a charm
2. Speakers......
   1. Right, so this is where my first issue arrives. Some speakers had registered for tickets ( and therefore were a contact) with a different email address than they registered to speak with.
   2. I exported the failures and done a VLOOKUP based on the last name and then done a manual check on them (37 records in total) then popped them back in and we are good to go.
3. Sessions were interesting, to say the least, I did customise Audience Type to Level 100-400 and updated Industry to our previous Topics (Dynamics, Azure, etc)
   1. So Imported the data and it matched perfectly ............ Or so I thought. I was looking at the data and the event speaker lookup didn't populate.
   2. I had to do some digging and found that there was an entity called Speaker Engagements which also needed to be populated as it an intersect entity.
   3. Ok, we have Data munged to set the Speaker, Event, and Session so we are all good now.
   4. Data imported and working :-)

Next, we have the event participants which links the contacts to the events.

This was a simple 2 fields. Attendee email and event name, the import was matched on the contacts email address and we have lift off.

That was over 6,000 registrations linked to all the events (this was the easiest part)

I now have a Microsoft Dynamics for Marking Instance that has data from all the previous events with all the attendees 

Next, I will be looking at the Buildings, Rooms, Event Vendors, and Hotels.