Moving from Glue Up to another membership system is mostly a data job. You export your memberships, contacts, companies and invoices, clean them into one list with a renewal date on every row, pick a quiet month, and invite members into the new system in waves. The part that needs the most planning is payment, because card details do not travel in a spreadsheet.
We make Portava, one of the systems a chamber or association might move to, so read this with that in mind. The steps work whichever system you choose. If you are still deciding whether to move at all, start with our comparison of Glue Up alternatives for chambers and associations. Every statement about Glue Up below links to the Glue Up help article it came from. Checked on 29 September 2026. Menus change, so open the current article before you export.
Write the list before you touch an export. The new system needs five things on day one: the people, the companies they belong to, the membership type each holds, their join and renewal dates, and whether each membership is paid, awaiting payment or in its grace period. Past invoices, event attendance and old email campaigns are usually better kept as an archive than moved. Export them and store the files where you keep member records.
Card details are the exception. In any membership system they are held by the payment processor, and they are not part of a spreadsheet export. So plan now how each member will pay at their next renewal. Find out which processor your Glue Up account uses and whose account it sits in; Glue Up's help centre lists the payment processors it works with, including Stripe and PayPal. Then ask both providers, in writing, what is possible. The answer decides whether members add a card at their first renewal in the new system, so get it before you tell members anything.
Glue Up's membership, contact and company exports are Excel files, and each one asks which fields to include and which time zone to use for dates and times. Choose your organisation's own time zone and tick more fields than you think you need; deleting a column later is easier than exporting again. Check a handful of renewal dates afterwards: for a British chamber overseas, a date read in the wrong time zone can shift by a day.
In the Membership module, open Memberships, filter the list and choose the export icon (Downloading Member Information). If the list has more than 200 entries, Glue Up emails you when the file is ready, and you download it from Import/Export History in the Organization Settings menu, on the Export History tab.
The same article covers exporting a single membership from its profile, with one sheet for the membership and one for its members. That is a quick check on a corporate membership with several named people.
Under Contacts, the Contacts and Companies lists each have an export icon with the same choices of fields and time zone (Downloading Contact and Company Information). Export both, so you hold a full copy of what Glue Up held.
In the Finance module, Invoices has a list selector that includes open, overdue and paid invoices, and the export icon downloads every invoice in the list you are looking at (Managing invoices). Only team members with access to the Finance module can see invoices, so ask your finance lead if the menu is missing.
Your new provider will probably want a single file, and may want CSV rather than Excel, so ask. Build one sheet from the exports and work through it column by column.
| Column | What to check |
|---|---|
| Name and email | One row per person. A corporate membership with four named people is four rows. Remove anyone who has left. |
| Company | The same company spelled the same way every time. "Smith & Co" and "Smith and Co Ltd" become two companies after an import. |
| Membership type | Each Glue Up membership type mapped to a type in the new system. Retired types need a decision. |
| Join date | Kept. It is easy to lose and hard to rebuild. |
| Renewal date | Filled on every row. Work out blanks from the last paid invoice. |
| Payment status | Paid, awaiting payment or in grace period, taken from the membership and invoice exports. |
Have whoever signs off your fees approve the membership type mapping. If you were planning to change your membership structure too, do it in a different month; two changes at once make every problem harder to trace.
Avoid your busiest renewal month. If most members renew in January, a December switch puts your largest batch of reminders into a system nobody on the team has used yet. Pick the quietest month you can.
Then set a cut-off date and decide what happens to renewals that fall around it. Glue Up's renewals list, in the Membership module's Workflow Manager, has an Upcoming tab that shows memberships within 30 days of expiry by default, tabs for renewals awaiting approval and awaiting payment, and a status filter that includes Grace Period. Export it on the cut-off day. One workable rule: a renewal already invoiced in Glue Up finishes there, and anything due after the cut-off renews in the new system. Members awaiting payment on that day are the ones to handle individually.
Run both systems side by side for a short, fixed period, and check the notice period and end date in your current contract before you fix any dates.
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| 8 weeks before | Export everything and store the originals. Ask both providers about card payments. |
| 6 weeks before | Clean the list, fill renewal dates, agree the membership type mapping. |
| 4 weeks before | Send the file to the new provider and check a test import. |
| 2 weeks before | Tell members what is changing and when. |
| Switch day | Cut-off. Export Glue Up's renewals list. |
| Weeks 1 to 4 | Invite members in waves. Follow up anyone who has not signed in. |
| About 4 weeks after | Stop using Glue Up day to day, once renewals already under way are finished. |
A week or two before the first invitations, tell members what is changing: the date, the address they will sign in at, what they need to do (set a password, and perhaps add a card at their next renewal) and who to contact if something looks wrong. Send it from a named person.
Invite a small first wave of board members, staff, committee members and a few members who will tell you honestly what is confusing. Fix what they find, then invite the rest in batches your team can answer questions from. After each wave, check who has not signed in and phone the main contacts of company memberships first, because they hold the renewals.
A move costs a season of staff time, and some teams are better off staying. If renewals run smoothly, members sign in and use what you offer, and the frustration is really about a process, fix the process first. A reminder going to someone who left the company is a data problem, and it follows you into any system. If the trigger is one missing feature, ask Glue Up whether it exists or is planned before you commit. And if your renewal peak is weeks away, wait until it has passed.
We make Portava, and a move into it is handled with you by the Portava team during onboarding. You send your cleaned list as a CSV file (up to 5,000 rows per file) in any column layout, and the team matches the columns when they load it. Excel files are not accepted, so save your Glue Up exports as CSV first.
Each row becomes a member on your register, with their company and renewal date. Anyone already on the register is skipped and listed, so a second file does not create duplicates. A blank renewal date means that membership does not expire or send reminders until someone sets one. Nothing is emailed during the import, so your team can check the register quietly.
When you are ready, your team selects members under Members and sends welcome invites. Up to 25 go straight away; a larger wave is queued and sent at up to 50 an hour, and each link lasts 7 days. The Welcome filter splits the register into Not invited, Invite queued, Invited and Claimed, which is your list for follow-up calls. Members pay your organisation through its own Stripe account.
There is no self-serve import yet, so every file goes through the Portava team. Events are not part of the import either: your team creates upcoming events in Portava, and as there are no recurring events, a monthly networking breakfast is created as a separate event each month. To walk through a move from Glue Up with us, request a demo.
Yes. Glue Up's help centre describes exporting memberships, contacts and companies as Excel files, choosing the fields and a time zone. For more than 200 entries Glue Up emails you when the file is ready. Invoices export from the Finance module. Export everything once, keep the originals untouched, and clean a copy.
Not through a spreadsheet. Card details stay with the payment processor and are not part of a member export. Ask your current processor and your new provider, in writing, what is possible, and plan for members to add a card at their first renewal if nothing else can be arranged.
Set a cut-off date. Renewals already invoiced in the old system finish there, and anything due after the cut-off renews in the new one. List the members who are awaiting payment on the cut-off day and deal with each of them individually, so nobody is billed twice or missed.
A few weeks is usually enough. Use the old system only to look things up and to finish renewals already under way, and do all new work in the new one. Much longer than that and the two sets of records start to disagree.
Glue Up is a trademark of its respective owner.