Small groups, teams, and rosters — moved into Planning Center Groups with member and leader assignments intact, instead of rebuilt by hand one group at a time.
Group memberships are the data churches most often give up on. Giving history is obviously valuable and obviously worth fighting for. Group structure feels reconstructible — until someone works out that "reconstructible" means an administrator opening two windows and retyping four hundred people into forty groups, with leader assignments, from a spreadsheet that is already out of date.
So it gets deferred. Then launch happens, the groups are half-populated, leaders cannot find their people, and the ministry that depended on that structure quietly reverts to the spreadsheet it was supposed to replace.
This is worth being precise about, because it is different from the giving situation. Planning Center imports people from a CSV, and it now has a donation import tool for giving. There is no equivalent for group memberships. The relationships between a group, its members, and its leaders have to be created inside Planning Center.
It is also the data type most third-party import tools skip. Donations, notes, and pledges are all records attached to a single person, which makes them comparatively simple. A group membership is a relationship between two things that both have to exist first — and that is the reason it tends to be left out.
Group memberships attach to people, so people have to land first. The sequence that causes the fewest problems is:
Running it the other way round leaves memberships with nobody to attach to. Because Port includes unlimited imports for the length of your access window, you can import a couple of groups first, look at them inside Planning Center, and then run the rest once you are satisfied.
Most churches doing a full migration are moving several data types at once. If you are also bringing giving history,pastoral notes, orpledges, theEverything Bundle covers all four for less than buying them separately.
Not natively. Planning Center imports people from a CSV and has a donation import tool for giving, but there is no built-in path for group memberships — the rosters, leaders, and member assignments that describe how your church is actually organised. That structure normally has to be rebuilt by hand, group by group.
Yes. Port carries member and leader assignments, so a group arrives with the person who runs it already attached rather than as an unowned list of names. Rebuilding leadership by hand is the step churches most often skip under time pressure, and the one that most affects whether the groups get used after launch.
Small groups, teams, and rosters — any structure your old system modelled as a group with people in it. If your export lists the group, the person, and their role, Port can place it in Planning Center Groups.
They arrive in all of them. Memberships are imported as relationships rather than as a single group assignment per person, so someone who serves on a team, attends a small group, and leads a third does not lose two of those three.
Port charges $249 for unlimited group membership imports with 180 days of access. There are no per-record fees and no volume tiers.
Yes. Group memberships attach to people, so bring your people into Planning Center first — that part Planning Center imports natively by CSV — and then import memberships on top. Running it the other way round leaves memberships with nobody to attach to.
Supported systems
Port ships a purpose-built parser for each of these, so your export is understood on upload instead of reshaped by hand. Coming from something else? Open Import handles any system that produces a CSV.
