Moving a club off ClubRunner or DACdb without losing anything

Export before you decide anything

Whatever you end up doing, get your data out and keep a copy. Clubs discover the shape of their own records only when they look at the export, and it is much better to discover it while you still have both systems.

Ask for the member list, the attendance history, and any dues or payment history. Take the widest export offered, even the columns you think are junk.

What usually comes across cleanly

Names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, join dates, classifications and membership types generally survive any move, because everybody stores them roughly the same way.

What usually doesn't

Be realistic about these before you promise the board a clean migration.

• Attendance history at meeting-by-meeting resolution. Often it comes out as totals or percentages, and the individual meetings are gone.
• Anything free-text — notes, follow-up history, why somebody left. This is where the club's memory lives and it is rarely in the export at all.
• Website content and page layouts. These essentially never transfer between systems, and any vendor who says otherwise is describing a rebuild.
• Photographs and documents, which usually have to be downloaded by hand and are the part everyone underestimates.
• Anything tied to Rotary International synchronisation, which is a relationship between your club and RI rather than a file you own.

Do it in the right month

Move in the quiet stretch after the July handover and before the autumn programme starts, with the incoming secretary involved from the first day. A migration run by an outgoing officer in June produces a system nobody who has to use it understands.

Run both systems for one full dues cycle. It costs a couple of months of overlap and it is the difference between a bad week and a bad year.

Good reasons not to move

Said plainly, because a guide that only argues one way isn't worth reading.

If your district pays for DACdb, it is effectively free to your club, and free is difficult to beat. If your club's main need is a public website with many pages that several people edit, ClubRunner does more there than we do. If your club synchronises membership data directly with Rotary International and relies on that, check carefully before moving — Sodalitas does not do it yet.

And if the only complaint is that the current system is ugly, that is a real cost but it is smaller than the cost of a migration. Wait until there is a second reason.