Introduction

Organizing data is a critical planning step in your transition to CiviCRM. What sort of contacts will you be managing and what are your data needs? How will your contacts be grouped and tagged? What relationships will they have between each other and you? What information will you want to get out of CiviCRM? Once you have a plan in place, you will want to get your existing data into CiviCRM the way you want. This often exposes the poor quality of your data, and the effort required to clean it up and get it into shape. This can sometimes take longer than the data planning stage. This chapter shows you some recipes that don't even use CiviCRM but will help get your data in shape. In other recipes we'll explore some of the techniques of organizing your data once you get it into CiviCRM.