CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have a small membership database in Excel CSV format that I'm trying to import as Individual contacts.  Everything is fine except that some of the records, prior to import, are flagged as errors and fail because they don't contain an email address!

I thought it might have something to do with duplicate checking, so I went into the duplicate checking rules and removed all the "Email" lines, but the import still doesn't like me importing records without an email address.  Does CiviCRM really insist that all records must have an email address??

Hey Dave - contacts are the people who have Memberships. So first you create the contacts - then you export them with their Contact ID and name - then you align that with your spreadsheet (ie sort the export so names are in same order as your original data, then copy, paste and tweak) - then you can get rid of the now redundant name fields, email etc - and import the Membership info pertaining to those contacts.

From memory import either required FIrst and Last or Email - but if that isn't working for you - you can just put in some obviously dud email names - then import - then export those with their contact ID, the reimport the Contact ID with a blank email field and use Update and it should clear them out.

HTH

Hey there Pete--just doing a quick check of the forum before dinner--thanks again for your help and the Skype offer   I'll try not to avail myself of your expertise and time unnecessarily.

So, just to make sure I've got this straight--you're saying that to import people from a CSV to contacts and then make them members, I have to:

1.  Import the people in the CSV file as contacts.
2.  Export the contacts with the Contact ID field and name data.
3.  Sort the exported file so that the Contact ID's are in the proper rows with their associated names in the original CSV file that I had imported.
4.  Import the original CSV file again, this time as Members rather than Contacts.

Is that right?  Wow...sounds like a more-complicated-than-it-needs-to-be process, but I'll give it a shot.  It seems so strange to me that the CSV has names, addresses, and membership type all ready to be imported in one step, but CiviCRM requires a sequence of import-export-import steps.

Oh well....so much still to learn!

--Dave

Sorry if I was unclear.  What I meant is this:

1.  I have a very simple CSV file that contains data regarding the people who are members of our tennis club.  In other words, the file contains each member's last name, first name, phone number, email address, and type of membership (Junior, Adult, etc).

2.  I've somehow managed to get the people in that CSV file imported as Individual contacts in CiviCRM.  However, obviously as you say I can't just leave it at that--apparently I need to assign each of them a membership type, which I've already created in Civi (I created the same membership types we have--Junior, Adult, etc).  That way, they will not only be CONTACTS, but also MEMBERS of our "Liverpool Tennis Club" Organization in CiviCRM.  I think that's correct?

So that's where I was stuck.  Before all this started, I just thought the import of our CSV member data to CiviCRM's database would be simple--just match the CSV file's last name, first name, phone number, email address, and type of membership information with the same fields in CiviCRM's contact/member database, and then click "Import"   But it seems like it's not quite so straightforward.

Anyways, I'll have to give it a shot.  I'm debating how much longer I can stay awake in the attempt, but I'll see if I can finagle it--thanks for your assistance!!