Here is a quick checklist to help you ensure you find a new home for all your CG3 data in your new CG4 site.
Wondering how long it might take to migrate all your content?
That really depends on how much content you have, and how many people you have helping you. Some groups are able to switch platforms in a few weeks. Some groups take longer, and that's okay!
For detailed steps on importing and exporting data on each site, please reference the relevant help articles.
- Member Data
- You will want to export and re-import your membership into the new system as an ACCOUNT. Special care will need to be taken to match old roles to their relevant CG4 counterpart. CG4 has limited roles with set permissions. For organizing your members into subgroups our committees, consider using the customizable subgroups options, or labels.
- We recommend not using the same the same UID number between the two systems and not importing that field. This is to avoid potentially overwriting any accounts you may have in CG4 that might use the same number as an account in CG3.
- Do not import users as "memberships". Memberships are used to store historical Membership records, such as "Standard member from January 2005 to August 2018".
- It is recommended to switch your CG3 Roles column to subgroups when importing to CG4. Then, after import, manually assign the CG4 roles to your accounts as needed. This helps streamline the import process, ensures your members stay organized, but removed the difficulty to splitting the CG3 roles into roles and subgroups, as CG3 used "custom roles", but CG4 uses roles (non customizable) and subgroups (customizable).
- you can easily organize your members using the "organize accounts" page after they are imported.
- Contacts
- Contacts were stored in a separate area in CG3, but in CG4 they will also be imported as accounts. Do not assign them a role, and they will have very minimal access, but will still be able to receive mailing list email. If you just want to keep their contact information but do not want to send them any kind of email, you can set their status to "blocked". Labels are a great way to organize contacts and labels are private and can only be seen by leadership.
- Events
- You can use the import function to import a list of events, but if you mostly have a repeating rehearsal, if may be easiest to add a repeating event.
- CG4 has different invite/RSVP options, so be sure to familiarize yourself with those options first.
- Music
- Music library information can be imported, but files will need to be uploaded separately.
- Create "Set Lists" to assign your music, rather than assigning songs individually.
- Set lists can also be configured to allow for music learning tracking.
- A migration tool for the music area is now available. It can transfer all your songs with their sheet music and learning tracks to your new CG4 site. Contact support to have this done for you. Songs will still need to be placed in set lists for access.
- Documents
- Documents is available in G4, with assignable folders and pages. You can place a variety of items in the documents area, including pdfs, word docs, images, and event links.
- You will need to manually move all your current documents from CG3.
- Mailing lists
- You will need to recreate your mailing lists. Please note that "public-facing" mailing lists are not offered in CG4.
- Unfortunately, your log of messages sent in CG3 cannot be moved over.
- Member Blogs
- The closest item to member blogs are "bulletins". If you have information you want to keep from previous blog posts that are useful notices to your members, Bulletins is the best place to do this in G4.
- Webforms and Polls
- You will need to recreate any relevant polls or webforms. These are all done in the "Forms" area.
- The CG4 Forms use a drag & drop interface to add questions, so this should be a fairly speedy process.
- You can download and export your webform results from CG3 if you need to keep a record of responses.
- There is no "simple polls" option in CG4, but Forms can be used to ask similar style questions.
- Forms in CG4 are onyl available at the "Team" license level.
- Riser Placements
- These are called "Places" in CG4, located under "Music" in the main menu on the left.
- CG4 and CG3 rices placements are not compatible, so you will need to re-create your placements in CG4.
- Places in CG4 allow for one curved riser formation, or multiple flat platforms that can be resized and moved around to suit a variety of arrangements.
- Image Galleries
- There is no dedicated image storage area in CG4.
- Images can be uploaded and attached or embedded in blocks and bulletins, but it is not recommended to handle a large number of photos this way.
- A google picture album or facebook group album might work well for sharing social photos of your group.
- Store Items
- You will need to recreate any store products you wish to sell.
- The new store offers a variety of product options with special workflows, and well as the option to have multiple "versions" of a product (the same t-shirt in multiple sizes, for example)
- The product types available in the store differ based on your CG4 license level.
- Public Site
- CG4 has one basic theme at this time. The public site is included for free in CG4.
- If you have a CG3 public site you wish to keep, please contact support@groupanizer.com to go through your options.
- You are not required to use the included public site, and can use an alternate service if you wish. However, the members site and the public site will have to live at separate urls (but you can easily link to your members site login from your public site).
If you have any questions or get stuck when migrating your data, please contact support@groupanizer.com.