Importing students with tags

Add tags to your students during a CSV import so you can target them later.

Tags let you label students — Postgraduate, Sydney Campus, School of Arts — so you can target a specific group later, such as restricting who is allowed to vote in an election.

This article covers adding tags to students in bulk. You can do it through the portal with a CSV.

Before you start

  • Tags are shared across your whole organisation. One list, reused everywhere.

  • Only custom tags can be assigned to students.

  • Tag matching is case-insensitive — Postgraduate and postgraduate are the same tag.

  • You don't need to create tags first. Any tag name that doesn't exist yet is created automatically during the import.

If you'd rather define your tags up front, do it under Settings → Custom tags.

Import a CSV in the portal

Step 1 — Prepare your file

Go to Students → Upload student list and click Download import template. The template includes a column for each question on your student record.

Add a column headed Tags (comma separated) and list each student's tags, separated by commas.

Name,Email,Student ID,Tags (comma separated)
Amara Osei,amara.osei@example.edu,S1042221,"Postgraduate, Sydney Campus"
Ben Whitlock,ben.whitlock@example.edu,S1042222,Undergraduate
Chen Liu,chen.liu@example.edu,S1042223,"Undergraduate, Sydney Campus"
Dara Nolan,dara.nolan@example.edu,S1042224,

Rules for the file:

  • Name and Email are required. Everything else, tags included, is optional.

  • Wrap the tags cell in double quotes whenever it contains more than one tag, so the comma isn't read as a new column.

  • Leave the cell empty for students with no tags.

  • Spaces around each tag are trimmed — "Postgraduate , Sydney Campus" is fine.

  • Because commas separate tags, a tag name cannot contain a comma.

Column headers are matched loosely — case and underscores are ignored:

FieldAccepted headers

Tags

Tags (comma separated), Tags (comma-separated), Tags, Tag

Name

Name, Fullname, Full name

Email

Email, Email address

Student ID

Student ID, StudentID

Step 2 — Upload and match your columns

Drag the CSV onto the upload page or browse for it. If your file has no tags column, one is added for you after Student ID — you can fill it in on the matching screen.

On Step 2/3: Match Students to Union Users, check every column is matched to the right field. The Name, Email, Student ID and tags headers are locked and can't be edited here.

Step 3 — Review and submit

Step 3/3 shows the total number of students and the fields being imported. Click Submit List.

What happens next

  • The import runs in the background. Students can take up to 5 minutes to appear in your student list.

  • Don't upload the same file again while you're waiting — you risk duplicate entries.

  • Students are matched to existing records, so re-uploading a list to add new tags updates those students rather than duplicating them.

  • Tagging is additive. An import only ever adds tags. It never removes a tag a student already has.

  • Any tag name that doesn't exist yet is created for you.

Next steps

Once your students are tagged, you can restrict an election to them — see Restricting an election to specific tags.