Can I easily sync/import Facebook Event attendees with a CiviCRM Event participant list?

Question

A lot of my users like to use Facebook Events for quickly inviting their friends and contacts to an Event.

Facebook allows Event attendees and status to be exported by the Event owner or manager - the only fields allowed to be exported are the Guest (attendee) full name and Facebook Event status (Going, Maybe or Invited).

I can export that attendee list from Facebook and import the attendees into Civi using an Unsupervised dedupe rule with First Name and Last Name (once I separate them out in the .csv file) and an updated Event Status to match Civi values (Registered or Attended).

But - is anyone using the Facebook API (or other Facebook Developer tools) or CiviCRM API to automate this process, and/or able to get more fields exported out from Facebook?

And if you're wondering "why not force your users to use a Civi online event registration page instead?", that's valid, but I'd rather not discourage my users from using other tools - especially Facebook, with which they are already very familiar and like - which is often not the case with Civi :(. I'd rather figure out how to quickly sync/integrate/import Facebook data into Civi.

Answer 1

I was using drupal to create a facebook event when a civicrm event was created and add the participants. There was a change in the facebook API that no longer supported post types for event objects. I'm not sure if that allows event registration though. The idea was using The Drupal Facebook Post module. and civicrm entity which created a rule on event creation or update and did a post to facebook. It worked pretty well and if the API supports adding people to an event you might take that approach (shouldn't require any code.) Please update us if you explore this approach.