It’s been a couple months since we set up the OPASS group on LinkedIN and we’ve had some people join, decided to take the next step of uploading a list of all our members to send invitations. Of course it’s not quite that easy! Over time our list had degraded, today I had to delete 118 bad accounts and a few unsubscribe requests, but I finally got that done and that should give us a clearer picture of what we have.

I exported the three fields they request (firstname, lastname, email) to a CSV and gave it a try, it only recognized the email address on the test parse. Went back and added a header row with values of firstname, lastname, emailaddress, and it worked fine. I like that they give you a preview so that if something is wrong you can fix it. Once loaded you enter a message for the invitation that is sent to the list. One part I didn’t like is they don’t prompt you to pre-approve the list. You  might or might not want to do that, but in my case I did so it meant I had to upload the list again to set the pre-approval – or end up saying “yes” to what will hopefully be a lot of people joining!