Merit can help keep your students up to date through automated regular imports. These recurring imports will need to be set up by a member of your team along with Merit's development team.
File Specifications
To use Merit's automated student import feature, you will need to generate a CSV file named students.csv that contains the fields listed below.
Please note that while the field order is not important, the field names must be exact matches.
first: Student's first name. Required
middle: Student's middle name. Optional
last: Student's last name. Required
city: Student's hometown city. Required
state: Student's hometown state. Optional
zip: Student's hometown postal code; used to match newspapers and gov't. Required
email: Student's primary email address, e.g., school email. Required
email2: Student's secondary email address, e.g., personal email. Optional
major: Student's major; free-form field. Optional
minor: Student's minor; free-form field. Optional
degree: Student's degree; free-form field. Optional
class_year: Student's class year; must be a four-digit number; e.g., 2026. Optional
ceeb_codes: Student's CEEB codes; separate multiple values with commas. Optional
parent_zips: Student's parent's postal codes; separate multiple values with commas. Optional
parent_emails: Student's parent's email addresses; separate multiple values with commas. Optional
opt_out: Student's opt-out status; 0 or false = opt in; 1 or true = opt out. Optional
Note: If a student has opted out of Merit, their opt-out status will not be overwritten through an automated import.
Learn more about how to format a spreadsheet for upload here.
File Sharing
Your students.csv file must be pushed to our secure Amazon S3 file drop (listed below) regularly. We recommend setting up a recurring job to generate and push this file to Merit periodically. Sharing the file once per week or month is enough to ensure your student data is kept up to date.
To upload your files, use the following curl command:
curl -X PUT -T SOURCE -H "Host: meritpages-com-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com" -H "Content-Type: text/csv" -H "User-Agent: SECRET" https://meritpages-com-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/PREFIX/students.csv<br>
You will want to replace the fields above with the following information:
SOURCE = the name of the file you are uploading
SECRET = a value generated for each customer
PREFIX = the subdomain that you are using with Merit
If you are ready to get started with automated student imports, contact a Merit representative at help@meritpages.com.