Moving from Planning Center to pplCRM
Planning Center People can export your list as a CSV, and pplCRM imports it through a guided wizard. People, households, tags and notes come across; giving and service plans do not, and this guide says so plainly.
First, get your file out of Planning Center.
In Planning Center People, make a list of the people you want (or everyone) and export it as a CSV.
Keep the header row. Name, email, phone and address columns are matched to pplCRM fields automatically under most common spellings; anything else gets a dropdown on the mapping step.
A very large list can be split into smaller files and imported one after another.
Menus move. If an export step has drifted, Planning Center’s own help docs will have the current path — the CSV the export produces is what matters here.
What maps to what.
Where each part of a Planning Center export lands — including the parts that have nowhere to land.
| In Planning Center | Lands in pplCRM as | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| First and last name | The person’s name | Matched automatically under most spellings. |
| The person’s email address | Also the duplicate key: a row matching an existing person can merge into their record instead of duplicating it. | |
| Phone | The person’s mobile number | |
| Street, city, state/province, zip | A household at that address | Rows sharing an address land in the same household, so families arrive together. |
| Campus, group or list columns | Tags on each person | Map the column to Tags on the mapping step and each value becomes a tag you can filter and segment by. |
| Notes | The person’s notes | |
| Custom fields | No matching field | Combine what you want to keep into your Notes column before exporting, or map a column to Tags. |
Then import it, in four steps.
A CSV with a header row — Excel’s save-as-CSV is fine. A very large list can be split into smaller files and imported one after another.
Every column gets a best-guess match you can correct with a dropdown. Unmapped columns are left out — nothing imports by accident.
Rows matching an existing person by email can merge (fills blanks, never overwrites), be skipped, or import as new. You can also tag everyone in the file and add them to a list, so the import stays findable afterwards.
Runs in the background and reports back how many rows landed — with skipped rows downloadable as a CSV that names the reason for each.
Every people import also runs a quiet check on each email address — whether its domain can actually receive mail, and whether it belongs to a throwaway-address provider. Failing addresses stay on the record but are suppressed from sending, so dead addresses from an old export are never sent to.
What does not come across.
Stated here, on the page — not discovered halfway through your move.
There is no donation import in pplCRM. Past gifts recorded in Planning Center Giving stay there — keep that export as your archive of record. Going forward, offline gifts (cash, cheque, bank transfer) are recorded one at a time on the person’s record, and online giving runs through pplCRM donation pages.
Planning Center Services rosters and plans have no counterpart here. pplCRM tracks the people side — households, volunteer status, tasks and follow-ups — not service scheduling.
The import creates and updates contacts; it never marks anyone as a newsletter subscriber. pplCRM records consent on each person separately, so after the import people are subscribed one at a time from their record — there is no one-click bulk subscribe — or they confirm themselves through one of your signup forms. Plan for this step before your first send.
Planning Center is a trademark of its owner. pplCRM is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Also moving from Breeze, NationBuilder, Mailchimp?
Run your Planning Center file on a free workspace.
Start free, import a test file, and see your own people on the screen before you commit to anything. No card required. Stuck on a column? Email us your header row and we’ll reply with what maps.