More Tips and Tricks for Importing Club Members – Families

As we continue to get large clubs importing existing memberships into RunSignup, we learn more and develop a few tools.

One of the powerful things RunSignUp offers is the idea of a single Membership covering multiple people. Very useful for Mom to sign up herself, her husband and two kids in a single registration. When this happens it all fits under a single Membership Account. And initially each of the family members is a sub-account of Mom’s RunSignUp (RSU) Account.

Now the interesting part. Each of the family members can actually “Claim” their own RSU account – or Mom can invite them to “Claim” their own RSU Account. This will let them login independently. So Dad might want to sign up for a race and can use his RSU account to do so. We still detect he is part of the Family Membership, so he gets credit for belonging to the Club for discounts in races that give a discount. And when the Family Membership renews, it renews all of the family.

When Junior goes off to live on her own, she can create her own RSU account and create her own Club Membership account as an Individual. When she meets the right partner, they can become upgrade to a Family.

The circle of life – Nice!

Now the tricky part – how to Import an existing Club Membership database to create these family relationships. There are three ways.

1. In the CSV Import, set the relationships with another column saying this member belongs to the membership above it in the CSV. This can be tricky depending on how you have your information stored currently. But it can save many hours and assure better data quality.

2. Merge Accounts once they are imported. You click on one person and then type in the other member numbers that should be merged.

3. We developed a special tool that you need to ask for access to that will do bulk merges and deletes on a page. We don’t make this generally available because we don’t want people making mistakes with mass deletes or merges.