What to export before you cancel anything
Whoever you are leaving, and whoever you are going to, the first job is the same: get your own data out while you still have an account that can produce it. This list is deliberately vendor-neutral — it is what to pull, in what order, and what is unrecoverable once the account closes.
Do this before you give notice, not after. A closed account is usually a read-only account for thirty days and a deleted one after that, and a support team that was helpful while you were paying is a queue once you are not.
Work top to bottom. The order matters: the first three are the ones you cannot reconstruct from anything else, and the last two are the ones people forget until an auditor asks.
- 01
The contact record, with every field — not the default export
Almost every platform offers a quick export and a full one. Take the full one. The default typically gives you name, email and status; what you want is membership type, join date, renewal date, every custom field you have added over the years, and the tags or groups. Custom fields are the part nobody thinks about and the part that took ten years to accumulate.
- 02
Payment and invoice history, as separate files
These almost always export separately from contacts, and often separately from each other. Take both even if you only intend to import balances. This is the record your treasurer will be asked to produce in three years, and it is the single most common thing an organization discovers it no longer has.
- 03
Documents and files
Bylaws, minutes, insurance certificates, architectural submissions, anything uploaded against a member or a property. Usually there is no bulk export at all and you are downloading them by hand. Start this early — it is the task that turns a one-afternoon migration into a two-week one.
- 04
Event history and registrations
Who came to what, and who paid. Attendance history is what tells you which members are actually engaged, and it is the first thing that gets left behind because it feels like history rather than data.
- 05
Email lists, and any unsubscribe or bounce state
The addresses are the easy part. What matters legally and practically is who has opted out and who has hard-bounced: importing a list without its suppression state means emailing people who asked you not to, on day one, from a new sending domain with no reputation. That is how a new platform gets blamed for a deliverability problem it inherited.
- 06
Your public website content, if the platform hosts it
Page copy, images, and the URL of every page that has ever been linked to. If you are moving hosting too, that URL list is what your redirects get built from — and without it, every link anyone has ever shared to your site breaks silently.
- 07
Anything you have integrated
Accounting sync mappings, payment processor connections, Zapier or webhook configurations. You are not exporting these so much as writing down what they were, because they will need rebuilding and nobody remembers the mapping six weeks later.
Two things to check before you press cancel
Open every file you exported. Not a spot check — actually open them. A CSV that exported successfully and contains only a header row is common, and you will not find out on the day the account closes.
Then check what your contract says about your data after termination, and specifically how long you keep read access. Thirty days is typical, immediate lockout is not unheard of, and the difference decides whether you can go back for something you missed.
One more, and it is the one that costs money: check whether cancelling mid-term forfeits the remainder of an annual payment, and whether the renewal date is close enough that giving notice now costs nothing. Several platforms in this category auto-renew on a date that is not the date you signed up.
Free to use, adapt and hand to whoever does this job next. If something here is wrong or missing, tell us and we will fix the page — contact us.