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Adding Events to Calendars in Bulk

Jennifer Miller

Hello. We are in the implementation phase with Blackbaud. I am wanting to add our calendar that we share with everyone in our community (parents, students, faculty, staff). If I understand correctly, there is not a way to add events to a calendar in the traditional way? (I'm imagining looking at my Google calendar.)

Am I correct that anything that goes on a calendar is done by adding an Event in either Core or School Website? Is it possible to upload to a specific calendar in bulk? I looked at the Data Import tool in Blackbaud Core, but did not see a category or template that seemed to fit.

Any tips are appreciated!

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Comments

Lynn Egan

@Jennifer Miller Yes, you can upload in bulk to a specific calendar. I do this every year off of our master calendar which is in excel. It is done through Core > Data Import > Create import job - under category choose Cntent Engine and under Import type choose Event Import (Insert Only) I do not add the event to multiple calendars through the import though. Once I have everything imported, I manually add the event to other calendars and featured. Hope that helps.

Jennifer Miller

@Lynn Egan
Thank you very much for this. I did a trial run with just 3 events. I tried to use template with pri group type desc and pri group desc, but I must not have gotten those set up correctly as it errored out. I tried to set up Community Groups. ?‍♀️ Hmmm….

Lynn Egan

@Jennifer Miller I haven't tried to upload events to community group categories, so not exactly sure how that would work.

Amy Sanga

@Jennifer Miller We actually sync Google calendars in various locations including our Blackbaud Website and the teacher calendar. You can explore this under Core, Events, Calendar Events

Michael Wilson II

@Lynn Egan
When I try this it fails.

Conversion from string "Category Title" to type 'Integer' is not valid.

There's no documentation on what this means…

Are the categories supposed to have a corresponding number somewhere already recorded in the system? If so, where might I find this?

Carolyn Stevens

@Jennifer Miller you will want to use the “Content Engine” import that Lynn described. I suggest scheme 1 that uses group/category description instead of scheme 2, which uses the system ID. The groups/categories where you want the events to land have to be created first (e.g. community groups and/or calendar event categories), otherwise the data has nowhere to go.

The primary is required in the import (just like when you create an event manually), then you can share to more than one place by using the additional group descriptions shown in the schema.

When I first started in this position, our school was creating events one at a time and sharing them manually. After one year of doing it, I committed to learn how to import and it's been an absolute game changer. What used to take a week (because I had to take breaks) now takes minutes.

Hope this helps!

Kim Hughes

@Jennifer Miller

I do similarly to Carolyn.

I do the import every year and I have the default calendar in the primary group type field and have import to additional calendars at the same time for some events. If someone unchecks a calendar it would still show on the other calendars as well, so people can't say they missed it on the calendar. Here's what a little of my import looks like. I generally have the bigger issue of cleaning up the locations to match the building and room as it is listed in CORE from the format I receive it in.

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