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Author Topic: Roles of Contacts and Members  (Read 2403 times)

sbrawner

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Roles of Contacts and Members
February 28, 2008, 11:51:54 am
I'm a little confused as to the purpose and use of Contacts and Members in CiviCRM...  Are they two totally different objects, are they linkable?  Is one subjugate of the other?

Is it possible to autolink them, do I have to import my current memberlist twice?

Donald Lobo

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Re: Roles of Contacts and Members
February 28, 2008, 12:19:54 pm

A contact is a core object. All members are contacts. A membership record(s) is more information about a contact and is thus linked to a contact (via contact_id)

Due to limitation with our import process, you will need to do two separate imports, one for contacts and one for contributions.

lobo
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sbrawner

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Re: Roles of Contacts and Members
February 28, 2008, 01:07:56 pm
Thanks, Lobo.

Is there any specific order I should do first, like import contacts, then export the contacts and re-import as members?  Or could I use the same input csv?  I'm guessing that you have to do the former because of the contact ID field?



I did try to do this importing the contacts first with all my happy little custom data fields, and then as members but it wasn't able to associate them together.

Thanks!

Donald Lobo

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Re: Roles of Contacts and Members
February 28, 2008, 02:31:40 pm

You can potentially drive this from one excel spreadsheet if your contacts have got unique emails etc (or not too many Bob Smith or John Doe) In the first past you create contact records and ignore all membership fields. In the second pass you use the name/email to match and import the membership records

You might want to play with a small subset to test with (10 records or so). If you hit some issues, please replicate on our demo site and we'll figure out whats happening etc

lobo
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sbrawner

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Re: Roles of Contacts and Members
February 28, 2008, 03:06:04 pm
Will do, thanks.  can't use emails as a key because some members don't have email.  Weird, right?

Should I go into the Contact Matching rule and get rid of that to keep it from being a problem?

Dave Greenberg

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Re: Roles of Contacts and Members
February 28, 2008, 03:23:55 pm
If you  have some other unique identifier in your legacy data - then the easiest approach is to import that the the contact records as "External Identifier". Then yo can use that same value to "match" membership records to the contacts you've imported.
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sbrawner

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Re: Roles of Contacts and Members
February 28, 2008, 04:10:21 pm
Like their old Member ID number?

Kurund Jalmi

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Re: Roles of Contacts and Members
February 28, 2008, 06:38:19 pm
Yes. Anything that is unique.

kurund
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  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
  • Old sections (read-only, deprecated) »
  • Support »
  • Using CiviCRM »
  • Post-installation Setup and Configuration (Moderator: Dave Greenberg) »
  • Roles of Contacts and Members

This forum was archived on 2017-11-26.