How to Migrate from Spreadsheets to a Charity CRM: A Step-by-Step Guide

Spreadsheets are where many charities start. They are free, familiar, and flexible enough to track almost anything — until they are not. If your organisation has reached the point where spreadsheets are creating more problems than they solve, this guide walks you through the full process of moving to a dedicated CRM, from auditing what you have today to getting your team confident on the new system.

TL;DR: Moving from spreadsheets to a CRM does not have to be a painful, months-long project. The key steps are: audit your existing data, clean it before you migrate, choose a CRM that fits your actual needs (not the biggest feature list), migrate in phases rather than all at once, and invest properly in training. Most small charities can complete the move in four to eight weeks.

Who this is for: Charity managers, operations leads, and service coordinators at small-to-medium UK charities currently managing contacts, cases, or programme data in Excel or Google Sheets.

How Do You Know It Is Time to Move?

The question is rarely whether spreadsheets work at all — they clearly do, or you would not still be using them. The question is whether they are costing you more than they save.

According to research by Teque, approximately 30% of small UK charities have no CRM system and are managing donor and beneficiary relationships in spreadsheets, email folders, and memory (Teque, 2024). Their analysis estimates that a charity with a team of three and around 2,000 contacts may be spending over 1,300 hours per year on manual data tasks that a CRM could automate — roughly 26 hours per week of staff time.

Here are the signs that your spreadsheets have become a liability:

Multiple versions of the truth. Different team members maintain their own copies of the same spreadsheet, and nobody is sure which one is current. Merge conflicts are resolved by guesswork.

Data entry errors are routine. Without validation rules, postcodes end up in phone number fields, dates appear in three different formats, and duplicate records accumulate silently.

Reporting takes days, not minutes. Pulling together numbers for a funder report means opening several files, cross-referencing tabs, and manually totalling figures — a process that should take seconds.

You cannot see the full picture for a single contact. A beneficiary's referral details are in one sheet, their session attendance in another, and their outcomes in a third. No single view ties it all together.

Compliance feels risky. Under UK GDPR, charities must be able to locate and delete personal data on request. If your data lives across dozens of spreadsheets on different laptops, responding to a Subject Access Request becomes a significant undertaking.

If three or more of these feel familiar, you have likely outgrown spreadsheets.

Step 1: Audit Your Current Data

Before choosing a CRM or thinking about migration tools, you need a clear picture of what you actually have. This is the step most charities skip — and the one that causes the most problems later.

The Charity Digital Skills Report 2024 found that 31% of charities say they are poor at, or not engaging with, the collection, management, and use of data (Charity Digital Skills Report, 2024). An audit is your chance to confront that honestly.

What to catalogue

Create a simple register of every spreadsheet your organisation uses for people data. For each one, record:

• What it contains (contacts, referrals, session attendance, donations, volunteer hours, etc.)
• Who maintains it and how often it is updated
• Where it lives (shared drive, someone's desktop, Google Drive, email attachment)
• How many records it holds
• Whether it contains sensitive or special category data (health information, safeguarding concerns, ethnicity)

What to look for

Pay attention to overlaps. If three different spreadsheets contain contact details for the same people, you have a duplication problem. If one spreadsheet references data in another via manual lookups, you have an integration problem. Both of these are things a CRM solves structurally.

A thorough audit typically takes one to two days for a small charity. It is time well spent — the output becomes your migration specification.

Step 2: Clean Your Data Before You Move It

There is an old principle in data management: rubbish in, rubbish out. Migrating dirty data into a new CRM simply gives you a more expensive version of the same problem.

Research widely attributed to Gartner suggests that 83% of data migration projects either fail or exceed their budgets and schedules, and poor data quality is cited as a leading cause (Gartner, via Group 47). Cleaning your data before migration — not after — is the single most effective thing you can do to avoid this.

A practical cleaning checklist

Remove duplicates. Sort your contact lists by surname and postcode (or email address) and identify records that appear more than once. Decide which record is the most complete and merge the others into it.

Standardise formats. Pick a single format for dates (DD/MM/YYYY), phone numbers (with area codes), and addresses. Apply it consistently. Most spreadsheet applications have find-and-replace functions that can help.

Fill in gaps. Where records are missing essential fields (such as an email address or organisation name), decide whether to attempt to fill them or mark them for follow-up after migration.

Archive inactive records. If you have contacts you have not interacted with in over two years, consider whether they need to be migrated at all. Fewer records means a cleaner, faster migration.

Check consent and legal basis. Under UK GDPR, you need a lawful basis for holding personal data. If your spreadsheets contain contacts you have no clear reason to retain, now is the time to let them go.

Plan to spend roughly one to three weeks on data cleaning, depending on how many spreadsheets you are working with. It can be tedious work, but it dramatically reduces problems during and after migration.

Step 3: Choose the Right CRM for Your Needs

The UK charity CRM market has matured considerably. Fundraising Magazine's annual Charity CRM Survey — completed by 453 charities in 2025 — provides useful benchmarks for satisfaction, cost, and ease of use (CiviPlus / Fundraising Magazine CRM Survey, 2025).

What to prioritise

Not every charity needs the same features. Your audit from Step 1 should tell you what matters most. Common priorities include:

For service delivery charities: Case Management with structured workflows, interaction logging, and outcome tracking. If you are running advice sessions, housing support, or youth programmes, this is your core requirement.

For organisations managing partner relationships: A Partner CRM that tracks organisations rather than just individuals — useful for infrastructure bodies, funders, and network organisations.

For funders and grant-makers: Grant lifecycle tools, due diligence, and Impact Reporting that can pull data directly from programme records.

For charities collecting feedback: Built-in Surveys that connect responses directly to contact or case records, rather than sitting in a separate tool.

For organisations managing venues or sessions: Integrated Bookings that link attendance data to the same contact records your team uses for everything else.

How to evaluate platforms

Request a trial or demo with your actual data (or a representative sample). Pay attention to how easy it is to import a CSV file, set up your fields, and produce a basic report. If the setup process requires a consultant, factor that cost into your decision.

Platforms like Plinth are designed for fast setup by non-technical teams — you can typically import your first spreadsheet and have a working system within a day. Enterprise platforms like Salesforce offer enormous flexibility but generally require more configuration time and technical expertise.

Choose the CRM that fits the team you have today, not the team you hope to have in three years.

Step 4: Plan the Migration

With clean data and a chosen CRM, you need a migration plan. The key decision is whether to migrate everything at once ("big bang") or in stages ("phased").

Big bang vs. phased migration

A big bang migration moves all your data into the new system over a single weekend or quiet period. It is faster, but riskier — if something goes wrong, everything is affected. Industry experience consistently shows that big bang migrations carry significantly higher failure rates than phased approaches.

A phased migration moves data in stages — perhaps contacts first, then cases, then historical records. It takes longer but lets you catch problems early and adjust before they compound.

For most small charities, a phased approach is safer and more manageable.

A phased migration plan

Week 1: Core contacts. Import your primary contact list into the CRM. Verify that names, emails, and key fields have transferred correctly. Ask two or three team members to test the records against the original spreadsheet.

Week 2: Active cases or programmes. Migrate the data you use most frequently — current cases, active programme participants, or live projects. This is the data your team will interact with daily, so accuracy matters most here.

Week 3: Supporting data. Bring across historical interactions, notes, attendance records, and any other data that provides context. This is often the largest volume of data, but it is less time-sensitive.

Week 4: Verification and cutover. Run parallel systems for a short period — entering new data into both the CRM and the old spreadsheet — to confirm nothing has been lost. Once you are confident, set a firm cutover date and retire the spreadsheets.

Keep your original spreadsheets archived (read-only) for at least six months after migration. They are your safety net.

Step 5: Avoid the Most Common Pitfalls

Having searched the web for charity-specific migration experiences, these are the mistakes that come up most consistently.

Pitfall 1: Migrating everything. Not all data deserves to be migrated. Outdated contacts, incomplete records, and data you no longer have a lawful basis to hold should be left behind. Migration is an opportunity to declutter.

Pitfall 2: No single owner. Every migration needs one person who is responsible for the project. Without clear ownership, tasks drift, deadlines slip, and conflicting decisions are made. This does not need to be a full-time role — but someone needs to be accountable.

Pitfall 3: Ignoring field mapping. Your spreadsheet columns will not map perfectly to CRM fields. "Contact Name" might need to split into "First Name" and "Last Name". "Status" might need to map to a dropdown with specific values. Work through this mapping before you import, not during.

Pitfall 4: Underestimating training. The Charity Digital Skills Report 2024 identified that 60% of charities cite finding funds for infrastructure, systems, and tools as their biggest barrier to digital progress, and 47% cite staff digital skills as a barrier (Charity Digital Skills Report, 2024). A CRM is only as good as the people who use it. Budget time for training — not just a one-off session, but ongoing support.

Pitfall 5: No testing before go-live. Always run a test import with a small subset of data first. Check that dates have not reformatted, that special characters have survived, and that relationships between records (such as a contact linked to an organisation) are intact.

Step 6: Train Your Team Properly

Technology adoption in charities often stalls not because the software is wrong, but because the team was not given enough time and support to learn it. The 2024 Charity Digital Skills Report found that 47% of charities identify staff digital skills as a barrier to progress — up from 41% the previous year (Charity Digital Skills Report, 2024).

What good training looks like

Start with the "why". Before showing anyone how to click buttons, explain why the organisation is moving away from spreadsheets. Connect the change to things they care about — less time on admin, easier reporting, better safeguarding.

Role-specific sessions. A caseworker needs to know how to log interactions and update case records. A manager needs to know how to run reports and monitor team workload. A finance lead needs to know how to track budgets. Do not put everyone through the same generic session.

Written guides and short videos. People forget 80% of training within a week if they cannot refer back to something. Create simple one-page guides for the three or four most common tasks in the CRM.

Designate a CRM champion. Identify one or two people in your team who will become the go-to experts. They do not need to be technical — they just need to be willing to learn the system well enough to help colleagues when they get stuck.

Follow up after two weeks and six weeks. Check in with the team. What is working? What is confusing? What shortcuts have people discovered? Use this feedback to refine your processes and update your training materials.

The goal is not perfection on day one. It is steady, confident adoption over the first two months.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to migrate from spreadsheets to a CRM?

For a small charity with fewer than 5,000 contacts and a handful of spreadsheets, expect four to eight weeks from starting your data audit to full cutover. Larger organisations with more complex data structures may need three to six months. The biggest variable is data cleaning — the messier your spreadsheets, the longer the preparation takes.

How much does a charity CRM cost?

Costs vary widely. Some platforms like CiviCRM are open source (free to use, but you pay for hosting and support). Purpose-built charity platforms typically range from free tiers for very small organisations up to several hundred pounds per month for larger teams. Enterprise platforms like Salesforce offer discounted licences for charities but often require paid implementation support. Factor in the hidden costs of setup time, training, and any data migration support you might need.

Can we keep using spreadsheets alongside a CRM?

You can, but it defeats the purpose. The value of a CRM comes from having a single source of truth. If half your team is still updating a spreadsheet on the side, you end up with the same version-control problems you had before. Use the CRM as your primary system and export to spreadsheets only when you need to share data with someone outside your organisation.

What if the migration goes wrong?

This is why you keep your original spreadsheets archived. If something goes seriously wrong during import — data is corrupted, fields are mismatched, records are duplicated — you can wipe the CRM and start again from your clean, backed-up spreadsheet. A phased migration approach reduces this risk significantly because you catch problems with a small batch before migrating everything.

Do we need a consultant to manage the migration?

For most small charities, no. If you have chosen a CRM designed for the charity sector, the import tools and documentation should be sufficient for a reasonably confident spreadsheet user to manage the process. Consultants become more valuable for larger organisations with complex data relationships, custom integrations, or data spread across multiple legacy systems.

Is it worth migrating historical data?

It depends on how you use it. If your funders require evidence of outcomes over the past three years, you need that history in the CRM. If you have five years of attendance records that nobody has looked at since 2021, you probably do not. Migrate what you will actively use, and archive the rest.

Recommended Next Pages

• What is Case Management? — Understand how structured case tracking works within a CRM.
• AI-Powered CRM for Charities — How AI features in modern CRMs can reduce the admin burden your team is trying to escape.
• What is Impact Reporting? — How a CRM makes funder reporting faster and more accurate.
• Modernising Grantmaking: From Paper to Platforms — A related journey for funders moving from manual processes to digital tools.

This guide was written by the Plinth team to help UK charities make informed decisions about their data and technology. Plinth is a charity management platform offering Case Management, Partner CRM, Impact Reporting, Surveys, and Bookings. We are one option among several — the right choice depends on your organisation's specific needs.