Your shiny new charity CRM looks great but it’s really only going to come alive when it’s full of data. It can be easy to overlook the migration process, but it’s a vital part of commissioning a new system, however your data was stored previously.
What Have You Got?
You may not realise just how many spreadsheets or other data systems your team have until you start looking. Getting a good understanding of what data is where and why it’s needed is a really important part of the implementation process generally. It’s vital when it comes to data migration. If you’ve got lots of similar but different data, possible duplication – that will all need to be sorted out, and the sooner you can start the better. Your new CRM is a great opportunity to spring clean your data, so don’t waste it.
What Do You Need?
Just because you have been keeping that data doesn’t mean that you still need to. The easiest data to migrate is the data that’s no longer needed and can be destroyed or archived. As you’re mapping all the data you have, asking yourself and your teams why you have it may make the whole job a lot easier.
It will also help your GDPR compliance. “Just in case we need it” isn’t a lawful basis for processing personal data. Going through everything and identifying the actual reasons for everything you’re going to migrate will save you compliance work.
You might find our free GDPR guidance helps you with this.
Tidy Up
If you’re bringing together different data about the same people, it’s likely you’ll need to do some de-duplicating. While you can do that once it’s in the system using Lamplight’s de-duplicator tool, we recommend you do it before migrating. If you’ve got two different phone numbers for the same person you’ll need to figure out which is the latest one, and you may need team members to put their heads together if it’s coming from different people. A computer might be able to tell you if a phone number is a valid phone number, but generally not whether it’s the correct number for that person.
It’s not a fun job; there’s no way around it. But better data is going to help you in the long run, with more reliable data and less data entry.
Precision Is Key
When we’re migrating data for a customer, we use a tool we’ve built into the system. We upload the sample of the data you provide well in advance of the migration. Your Implementer will work through it table by table, field by field, option by option. They match everything to it’s new home in Lamplight, and at the end of it give you a full map that shows the destination for every item of data.
That precision is key. Once the migration is done you’ll want to see everything where you expect it, and getting this right will make it much easier for you and your team when it gets to go live. Shortcuts at this point can lead to confusion, errors, or delays as data has to be re-migrated or moved in place. Our detailed, careful mapping makes the actual migration process much smoother when it does go ahead.
Tracing It Through From Source
Our data migration whizz will take this agreed map and convert it into a kind of computer programme. This programme takes a copy of your data, and exports it in the right form to be added to Lamplight. There are some big advantages to this approach, compared to various manipulations in Excel.
- Every change to your data is documented. The programme can be followed through step by step to trace how every single value got from the original source to final destination. In complex migrations this can be vital
- It’s easily repeatable. That means we can do test runs, or partial migrations, if needed. For training, or verification purposes, this can be very useful.
- It’s fast. We work on test data to produce the programme, which may take several days or even weeks. We can start on this well in advance of the final migration date. The final migration can then proceed very quickly – you upload the final extract of your data, we run the programme and insert it into Lamplight. The difficult stuff is automated, and fast.
A successful CRM transition doesn’t end with choosing the right system—it’s built on a foundation of clean, meaningful, and well-organised data. By taking the time to understand what data you have, what you actually need, and how best to prepare it, you’re setting your organisation up for a smoother go-live and a stronger future. With Lamplight’s careful, transparent, and repeatable data migration process, you can be confident that your data will land exactly where it should—ready to power your work from day one.
Photo by Daria
