7. Migration of Existing consent

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Posted25th November 2025
Last Updated On25th November 2025
Bybrian

Some clubs already collect detailed consent information before moving to Crossmember — In our Yearbook example:

  • Yearbook permission
  • Communication methods
  • Email address members wants to use
  • Address or part of that the member wants to use
  • etc.

Until version 6.0.0, Crossmember only recorded a single consent tick-box (“I consent to the Privacy Policy”).
With the new GDPR system, clubs can create Consent Option Definitions and record each specific choice properly.

To avoid losing any existing historical consent, Crossmember provides a migration tool for the “Migration of Existing Consent”.

This report lets you upload your club’s previously collected consent so that your members begin with a proper baseline inside Crossmember.

Why migrate consent?

Migrating consent ensures:

  • Members don’t have to re-enter preferences they already gave
  • Clubs meet GDPR obligations by keeping accurate consent history – they already have the consent recorded elsewhere
  • Membership secretaries avoid time-consuming manual updates
  • Future GDPR reports (stale consent, no consent, policy superseded, etc.) work correctly from day one

It gives the club a clean, complete starting point for the new system.

What you need before you can migrate

Before you can upload any data, you must:

Create your Consent Option Definitions

These are the custom consent fields you want to store, such as:

  • yearbook
  • contact_by_email
  • display_vehicle

Each definition needs:

  • a label
  • a description
  • a type (checkbox, drop-down, text box, or multi-select)

These definitions determine the column headings in your migration spreadsheet.

Gather the consent your club has already collected

This may be stored in:

  • a spreadsheet
  • a membership database
  • your old CRM
  • paper forms transcribed into digital format

You simply need to gather each member’s existing choices in a tidy form.

How the migration spreadsheet works

A club-specific spreadsheet template is required to do the upload.

This spreadsheet contains the following columns:

  • The member number in column A (member_num)
  • A column for each of your active Consent Option Definitions
    • The header row for each of these definitions must be identical to the tag of your option definition
    • e.g. {{5_yearbook_email}} would have as the header ‘5_yearbook_email’ – Note the lack of curly braces

For example, if your club created:

  • “Printed Magazine” (checkbox)
  • “Yearbook Permission” (checkbox)
  • “Preferred Contact Method” (drop-down)
  • “Regions to Contact Me About” (multi-select)

Then the spreadsheet will contain exactly these columns:

  • member_num
  • 1_printed_magazine
  • 2_yearbook_permission
  • 3_preferred_contact_method
  • 4_regions_to_contact_me_about

The number at the front of the tag will be the number allocated to your option definition on the GDPR setup page.

Every club’s spreadsheet is different, because it is applicable to their own GDPR setup.

Completing the spreadsheet

The club fills in each row with:

  • the member’s ID
  • their previously recorded answers for each definition

The answers must follow the same format Crossmember uses:

  • Checkboxes: yes or no
  • Drop-down: one of the allowed values (as written in the definition)
  • Multi-select: a comma-separated list of chosen values
  • Text boxes: the text the member provided

You do not need to fill in every field — missing answers are allowed.

What migration does not do

Migration:

  • does not change your existing Privacy Policy
  • does not create historical consents (only the new baseline)
  • does not overwrite future consents — once members update their consent, Crossmember records a new version

Migration simply establishes a first, accurate consent state for the club.

Summary

  • Migration is for clubs that already collected consent outside Crossmember.
  • Create your Consent Option Definitions first.
  • Create a spreadsheet with one column per consent definition.
  • The club fills it with existing consent data.
  • Send to the Crossmember administration team for test and upload.
  • This enables all GDPR-related tools and reports to work correctly from day one.
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