Contacts and groups is the central database of your workspace, shared across every event. You add contacts manually or by importing them from Excel or CSV, and you use groups to target communication and control visibility. A well-planned group structure saves hours of work — a poorly planned one means manually re-assigning hundreds of attendees later.
Decide how many groups you need and what the splitting criteria are. Typical criteria: attendee type (VIP, standard, speaker, partner), source of registration (who invited them), workshop or track, company affiliation.
Create the groups before you launch registration, not during it.
You can add contacts manually or in bulk by importing an Excel or CSV file. The import puts contacts into groups, fills custom fields and the preferred language, optionally assigns them to an event, and shows you what will happen before anything is written.
Assigning a contact to an event is a separate step from creating it in the workspace.
In the workspace left menu (at account level, not inside an event) you see the item Contacts and groups. Inside an event, the bottom of the menu also has a link to contacts and groups, and on the event Overview the Tools section has a button for quick access.
Contacts are shared across the entire workspace — the same contact can be assigned to any number of events. Data such as name, e-mail, phone, company, custom contact fields, and preferred language are shared across events.
One at a time. Click + Add contact and fill in the data. Useful for ad-hoc additions (for example, when an attendee who did not go through registration needs to be added by hand).
Bulk import from a file. The import lives on the Import tab in Contacts and groups. The wizard has four steps: Upload, Mapping, Validation, and Import. Nothing is written to the database until you click Confirm and import in the Validation step, so you can run through the whole thing as a dry run.
Prepare the file. Download template gives you an Excel file with the columns First name, Last name, Company, Company ID, E-mail, Phone, Job title, and Language, plus a sample group column and a sample custom-field column. The template is optional, though: you can upload an export from another system (xls, xlsx, or csv) and match its columns in the Mapping step. The only required value is the e-mail address.
Put groups and custom fields in the header. A column named #VIP puts every contact with anything in that cell (for example yes) into the group VIP. If your groups sit in one column as text (VIP, Speakers), you map that column to Groups from value in the next step; separate the names with a comma, a semicolon, or a vertical bar. A custom contact field gets a column named *Field name. You do not have to create the group or the custom field first; the import creates it.
Upload. Choose the file and pick the Import mode (see below). Optional event assignment assigns every imported contact to the selected event, so you do not have to do it separately. The Default language field is used for rows where the language is missing or not recognized. Continue with Upload and load.
Mapping. The table shows each column of your file, a sample of its values, and the contact field it maps to. Happenee suggests the mapping from the column names and understands both Czech and English headers (Příjmení as well as Last name). Check it, leave the columns you do not want on Skip, and continue with Validate import. The wizard does not continue without a column mapped to e-mail.
Validation. Happenee goes through every row and shows a summary: how many rows are fine, how many have an error, how many are duplicates, how many contacts will be created and how many already exist, and how many group assignments, custom-field values, and event assignments the import will make. Below the summary you see the list Newly created groups and the Problem rows table with the row number, e-mail, status, and a description of the problem. Download report gives you a CSV with the status of every row. If you want to fix the file, edit it and upload it again; the unfinished import has written nothing. Otherwise confirm with Confirm and import: rows with an error and duplicate rows are skipped, the rest are imported.
Import. You watch the progress and the result: how many contacts were created, updated, assigned to the event, skipped, and how many failed. The report is available here too. Every finished import appears in Import history below the wizard, together with its report.
The Import mode decides what happens to contacts that already exist in the workspace (they are matched by e-mail):
Fill missing data (default) — leaves existing contacts as they are and only fills in a missing preferred language and empty custom fields. New contacts are created.
Overwrite data with non-empty values — overwrites the name, company, phone, and other details of existing contacts with the values from the file. An empty cell never erases anything.
In both modes, groups are only added; an import never removes a contact from a group. The e-mail address is never overwritten, because it is the key used to match contacts.
Validation marks as an error a missing or invalid e-mail address, more than 20 groups in one cell, and a group name longer than 100 characters. A duplicate is the same e-mail address appearing a second time in the same file; only the first row is imported. A row without a language passes and just gets the default language. The file can have at most 20,000 rows and 50 MB, the header row with the e-mail column must be within the first 100 rows, and cells with formulas need a stored value (save the file in Excel or replace the formulas with values).
The preferred language matters at import time because Happenee uses it when sending the Invitation e-mail and e-mail campaigns. Fill the Language column with a two-letter code (cs, en); Happenee also accepts forms such as čeština or english. Where the language is missing, the Default language from the Upload step is used; it does not overwrite a language an existing contact already has.
You can tailor the contacts table to whatever you are working on:
Search — the Search contacts field searches by name, e-mail, event, or group. If you enter an event name, you get the list of contacts assigned to that event.
Columns — the Columns button opens the Column settings panel ("Choose the columns you want to see in the table."), where you tick what to show. Last name and first name and E-mail are always on and cannot be turned off; you can optionally add Events, Groups, Company, Company ID, Phone, Job title, and your custom contact fields. Confirm with Apply. Click the arrows in a column header to sort.
Filters — the filters above the table match the columns you have turned on: as soon as you add the Company column, a Company filter appears. You can combine filters and clear them all with Clear filters.
Columns and filters are linked on purpose — whatever you show as a column, you can filter by. This helps before a bulk action: filter down to exactly the contacts the action should apply to (for example by group or company), and only then select them.
Creating a contact in the workspace does not assign it to an event — that is a separate step. You handle assignment from the contacts table using bulk actions:
Select one or more contacts with the checkbox in the row — a bulk action bar appears above the table.
Click Event assignment in that bar, adjust which events the selected contacts belong to in the list that opens, and confirm.
Through a group — on the Groups tab, select a group and use Event assignment to assign the whole group to an event in one step; every member of the group is assigned.
A single Event assignment action covers both adding and removing at once. Removing a contact from an event does not delete it from the workspace — it stays in the central database and simply stops being tied to that event.
You edit a specific contact through the pencil icon in its row — this opens the Edit contact side panel with four tabs:
Basic information — first name, last name, e-mail, company, job title, phone, company ID, preferred language, and a photo (square, 1:1 ratio).
Custom fields — the values of your custom contact fields.
Events — which events the contact is assigned to; you add and remove assignments right here (use Search event to find one).
Groups — which groups the contact belongs to; adjust membership with the checkboxes (use Search group to find one).
The panel works as a complete record for one contact — details, events, and groups managed in one place, without bulk actions. Save your changes with Save.
You delete a contact either in bulk (select it in the table → Delete contact) or from the edit side panel. A contact can be deleted only if it has no groups or events assigned — while it still has any, the button stays disabled. So first remove the contact from all groups and events, and only then delete it.
Deletion is permanent and removes the contact from the entire workspace. If you only want it out of a single event, do not delete it — just remove it from that event (see above).
You create groups in the Groups tab (inside Contacts and groups).
Click + Add group (or Create new group).
Enter the group name (for example, VIP, Speakers, Brno, Partner Siemens).
Save.
Groups are global to the workspace. Local groups (unique to a single event) are not available today.
There are three ways:
At import time — with a #Group name column, or with a column of group names mapped to Groups from value. A group that does not exist yet is created.
Manually in the contacts table — select the contact or contacts and use the bulk action Add or remove from groups, then pick the group (the same action also removes them from a group). You can also adjust one contact's membership in the edit side panel, on the Groups tab.
Automatically through the Registration form — when an attendee picks an answer, they are assigned to a group based on that answer. You configure this on the answer (see How conditional questions work in the Registration form).
Groups serve four main purposes in Happenee:
Targeting communication — you can target an e-mail campaign to selected groups. The Invitation e-mail does not support targeting by group.
Controlling visibility — content features (Agenda, Speakers, Custom content) and engagement features (Notifications, Polls, Survey) can be shown only to selected groups.
Conditions in the Registration form — both a question and a specific answer can be shown only to selected groups, and an answer can assign the attendee to a group.
Reporting — attendee statistics can be filtered by group.
Plan the group structure before you launch registration. Think through who you will want to differentiate, and create the groups so the Registration form can assign them automatically. After the fact you can still assign groups in bulk, but it is manual work.
Keep the default Fill missing data: it leaves existing contacts alone and adds groups just the same. Choose overwriting only when the file carries newer data than the workspace. The Validation step shows how many existing contacts the import will touch, and the report carries a warning for each of them that it will be updated.
Groups from an import are created automatically and matched by name, ignoring letter case. A typo in a # column header or in a cell mapped to Groups from value creates a new group. Before you confirm, go through the Newly created groups list; if you see a group you already have, fix the file and upload it again.
Validation marks the second occurrence of an e-mail address in a file as a duplicate and skips that whole row, including the groups and details it carried. Merge rows with the same e-mail address into one before you upload.
Always assign a contact to the event after you create it — one at a time, through a group, or right during the import with Optional event assignment. The assignment is a separate step from adding the contact to the workspace.
The import never leaves the language empty: where it is missing, it uses the Default language from the Upload step. For a mixed list, fill in the Language column on every row; for a single-language list, setting the default language correctly is enough. Both the Invitation e-mail and e-mail campaigns are sent according to this setting.
Groups today exist only at workspace level. If you need to differentiate groups across events, name them with a prefix (Conference25_VIP, Workshop25_Speakers).
A contact cannot be deleted while it still has any groups or events assigned — Happenee blocks this so a deletion does not break data for a running event. Remove the contact from all groups and events (with the bulk action, or in the edit side panel on the Groups and Events tabs), and only then delete it. If you only need the contact out of a single event, do not delete it — remove it from that event instead.
