How to export your member data from Membee: a step-by-step guide
The moment to export your data is before you have decided to leave, not after. An export you already hold turns cancelling from a risk into a scheduling question.
This is what to get out of Membee, in what order, and how to check you actually got it.
One note on the click path
Membee's export lives in its admin and reporting area, and the exact menu labels move between releases. Rather than give you a click path that will be wrong the first time they reorganise a menu, this is the list of what you need and the names to look for. If something here has no obvious export in your account, that is the question to put to Membee support in writing, which is also useful evidence of what is and is not available.
What to export, in priority order
1. Member records. Organizations and individual contacts, which are usually separate exports. Include contact details, member category or type, join date, renewal date, and status. Get lapsed and cancelled members too. They are your reactivation list and they are the ones most often left behind.
2. Invoice and payment history. Not just outstanding balances. The full history, with dates, amounts, what each invoice was for, and how it was paid. This is the export people most often skip and most often need, usually at year end when a treasurer or auditor asks a question about a period that is now in a system you no longer have.
3. Event records. Events, registrations, attendance, and any fees collected. Attendance is the strongest predictor of renewal you have. Losing it breaks nothing on the day and costs you every engagement report afterwards.
4. Custom fields. Every chamber has fields somebody added years ago: committee membership, sponsorship tier, a flag for who gets the printed directory. They are the least standardised part of any system and the easiest to lose because they do not appear in a standard member export. Make the list before you export, not after.
5. Email templates and communication history. Templates so you are not rewriting your renewal sequence from memory. History so you can answer "did we tell them?"
6. Notes. Free-text notes on member records hold years of institutional memory. Two warnings: they rarely export as a tidy column, and they frequently contain candid remarks about members that were written for an audience of two. Read them before you move them anywhere.
Take your baseline counts at the same time
Before you touch anything, write down four numbers from Membee on a specific date:
- Member organizations, and separately, individual contacts
- Active versus lapsed
- Open invoices, with the total dollar value
- Events with registrations in the last twelve months
That is your acceptance test for whatever comes next. Without it, "did everything come across" is a feeling rather than a check. Take the counts when nobody is editing, and do not retake them mid-move.
What does not export cleanly, from any platform
Being honest about this saves you a surprise later.
Relationships between records. Which contact belongs to which organization, which registration belongs to which event, which payment settled which invoice. Flat CSVs express these as ID columns at best, and sometimes not at all. This is the single most common source of a migration that technically completed and is subtly wrong.
Anything computed rather than stored. Engagement scores, tenure calculations, "member since" values derived from other fields. If the platform calculates it on the fly, it is not in the export and it will need recalculating.
File attachments. Logos, signed documents, certificates. Usually a separate process from the data export, and usually forgotten.
Formatting inside notes. Line breaks, bullets and anything pasted from Word tends to arrive as a single run-on field.
What to do with the files once you have them
Keep the raw export untouched. Copy it before you clean anything. The original is your evidence of what the old system actually held, and once you have edited it you no longer have that.
Clean in the old system where you can. Duplicates, dead addresses and members who left in 2019 are all easier to resolve where staff recognise the records and remember why one looks odd.
Open the CSVs and look at them. Not a skim. Check that dates are in one format, that currency columns do not carry symbols, and that no field has silently truncated. Membee exports, like most, use inconsistent column naming across different exports of the same account.
Store the archive somewhere you control and outside the platform you are moving to. A cancelled account takes its data with it, sometimes on a shorter timeline than you expect.
Ask two questions in writing before you cancel
How long after cancellation is the data available? Some platforms keep an account readable for a grace period, some do not. The answer determines how much runway you have to discover something missing.
Is there a charge for an export or an assisted extract? Ask before you need it rather than while you are leaving.
Where this sits
Exporting is the first of three steps and the easiest one. The harder parts are running the move without losing the relationships between records, and proving nothing was lost before you switch the old system off. Those are covered in how to switch from Membee without losing a member record.
For what it is worth, this is also the test worth applying to whatever you move to. Ask what leaving looks like while you can still walk away, which is before you sign rather than after. Ours is on the data ownership page: JSON, CSV or SQL from the dashboard at any time, free, including invoices, payments, event registrations and the audit trail.
A platform that makes leaving easy is telling you something about how it expects to keep you.