CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Given that I am importing contact then memberships then contributions and we have duplicate email addresses in our data (for people who registered together) it seems sensible to match our old Member ID with the External ID field.
However, External ID seems to be a "special" field in that it isn't exposed anywhere in contact view/edit or in Advanced search. Our members occasionally need to access their ID (for example we recently had members told they could get a discount to an event overseas if they supplied their national association membership ID).

Would the best fix for this be to create a custom field, duplicate the data column, and map to both fields?

[Phase 3 of learning: devising your own solutions to problems and seeking validation]

Depends on how attached you/others are to their existing membership ID.
The 'best' fix in my view would be something like the following

import old membership id as external id
- inform members you have a new system and hence a new id
- give them their civi id
- use the External ID to import other data since you can match on that (not sure about the comment above about de-duping not working as i am pretty sure you can set Matching Rules to work on just Ext ID - but you don't need to using the Import Wizard since picking the External ID field is sufficient)

If very attached to old numbers then something like
- start with an empty civi
- mess with you spreadsheet before importing so you have a row for every number up to and including your latest Member
- include an extra field and set it so you know that you can use it to remove the 'ghosts' you created for non existent members