Bringing Your Members Over From a Spreadsheet

Nearly every venue that joins us arrives with a spreadsheet. Sometimes it's a tidy one. More often it's a file called "members FINAL v3" that four different people have edited over six years. Here's how to move it across without losing a weekend to copy and paste.

Tidy before you import

• One row per member and one column per piece of information.
• Dates in a single format. Mixed date formats are the most common reason an import stops halfway.
• People who left years ago either removed or moved to a separate sheet, so you can import them as lapsed members.
• Anything you no longer need left out. If nobody has looked at the fax column since 2009, now is the moment.

Members first

Save the sheet as CSV, upload it and match each column to a Tidewell field. Anything that doesn't fit an existing field can become a custom field. The importer previews the first twenty rows and lists any problems before saving anything, so you can fix the spreadsheet and try again as often as you like. Nobody gets an email during an import, so there's no rush.

Then bookings, then the rest

Future bookings come next, because members start checking the calendar the day you tell them about it. Past bookings and payment history are useful but can wait a week. Rotas are usually quicker to rebuild by hand than to import.

Before you announce anything, invite a handful of members to log in and look around. They'll spot the misspelt surnames and the three slightly different copies of the same person long before your newsletter goes out.