Import requirements for activities, contributions, memberships, participants and tags¶

Import activities¶

To insert new activities, the CSV file must include at least:

Activity Date
Activity Type ID
Target Contact ID (Match to Contact)
Subject

To update existing activities, the CSV file must include at least:

Activity ID
Activity Date
Activity Type ID
Target Contact ID (Match to Contact)
Subject

Target Contact ID attaches the activity to the contact the activity is done on. Import contacts before running the activity import; these are separate import jobs.

Import contributions¶

You can insert new contributions or update existing ones. If you are on a recent version of CiviCRM and enable the Civi-Import extension, you can also create or update the contact and any soft credit contacts in the same import.

To insert new contributions, the CSV file must include at least:

Fields to match (or create) the contact.
Financial Type
Total Amount

The contact fields required depend on whether Civi-Import is enabled. If it is not, you need:

Contact ID or External Identifier or all the fields used in your Unsupervised Duplicate Matching rule (to match to an existing contact)

If CiviImport is enabled, the above still applies to matching contacts, but you can specify which Dedupe rule to use.

Import memberships¶

You can insert new memberships or update existing memberships.

To insert new memberships, the CSV file must include at least:

Contact Id or External Identifier or all the fields used in your Unsupervised Duplicate Matching rule (to match to an existing contact)
Membership Type
Membership Start Date

To update existing memberships, the CSV file must include at least:

Membership Id (to match to an existing membership)
Membership Type
Membership Start Date

You can also use update existing memberships to import new data or change existing data in other core or custom membership fields. Include Membership ID to match the existing membership, plus Membership Type and Membership Start Date in the CSV file, even if the values for those fields have not changed.

Import participants¶

In each import session, you can either insert new registrations or update existing participant records.

To insert new registrations, decide whether to restrict registrations for each event to one per person (set On duplicate entries to Skip) or allow duplicate registrations for the same event from a contact (set On duplicate entries to No Duplicate Checking). In either case, the CSV file must include at least:

Contact Id or External Identifier or all the fields used in your Unsupervised Duplicate Matching rule (to match to an existing contact)
Event ID
Participant Status

To update existing registrations, set On duplicate entries to Update. The CSV file must include at least:

Participant ID (to match to an existing registration)
Event ID or Event Title
Participant Status

You can also use update existing registrations to import new data or change existing data in custom participant fields. Include Participant ID to match the existing registration, plus Event ID or Event Title and Participant Status in the CSV file, even if the values for those fields have not changed.

Import tags¶

There is currently no inbuilt way to import tags or tag sets. You can use this advanced extension.

To assign individual tags during a contact import, either:

Split the CSV file by individual tags and import each subset separately as described above.
Create temporary custom fields and import tags into them as standard data. After import, use advanced searches to isolate contacts with particular values and mass tag them. You can remove the custom fields when finished.