Video tutorial: Importing profiles

Important notes about preparing your data:

Ensure your data is clean and tidy

Never is the saying 'Garbage in, garbage out' more appropriate than when importing your data into a new system. Take the time to review your data and remove any unwanted records, ensure you have included all the necessary data fields and clean up any malformed data or cell values before you attempt to import it.

Data format

All data imported must be well formed CSV. This is a common format for importing data, however if it’s not formatted correctly your data is unlikely to import correctly. This site provides detailed instructions on how to achieve well formed CSV - CSV on the Web: A Primer.

Include well-formed and descriptive field headings

Be sure that your file has column (field) headings. We recommend the column headings are descriptive of the value to help with mapping the fields correctly. Do not include numbers, spaces or special characters in the column headings as this will cause errors with the import process.

For the standard Membes system fields you can download a list of the system field headings to include as column headings in your data so the import process will automatically map those fields.

Custom fields and field options

When importing data into fields that have multiple options, you will need to ensure that your data exactly matches the field options you’ve created in Membes, if they’re not an exact match they won’t import correctly. If a column has multiple field options each option needs to be separated by a comma, and it’s critically important there are no spaces either side of the comma ie. option1,option2,option3. A space is considered a character and will result in your field options not being an exact match.

Plan your import

Spend some time working out exactly what fields you wish to import. It can help to create a field map showing which fields will import to where.

Conduct a sample import

Once you have cleaned your data and planned your import, save a separate CSV file with a number of sample records. Import the sample file and test the data to ensure it has imported correctly. If there are issues, you can delete the test batch, correct the data and re-import. If the import was successful, you can continue to import the remaining data.

Import in batches

If you have a large number of profiles to import, don't attempt to import them all at once. Break the import down into smaller batches, for example by membership type or state. This allows you to progressively check the imported data and identify any issues early on. If there are any issues with a particular batch you can delete it and re-import without having to delete all the data. A good batch size is around 25-30 profiles.

If you’re working with a big file that has a large number of records, the data may take a few minutes to upload.