Moving from Breeze to pplCRM
Breeze can export your people to a spreadsheet in a few clicks, and pplCRM imports that file through a guided wizard. People, families, tags and notes come across; this guide also says plainly what does not.
First, get your file out of Breeze.
In Breeze, open People and export everyone to a spreadsheet. If it opens in Excel, save it as a CSV — the import wizard reads CSV files, not .xlsx.
Keep the header row. Columns named things like First Name, Last Name, Email, Mobile, Street Address, City, State and Zip are matched to pplCRM fields automatically; anything else gets a dropdown on the mapping step.
A very large list can be split into smaller files and imported one after another.
Menus move. If an export step has drifted, Breeze’s own help docs will have the current path — the CSV the export produces is what matters here.
What maps to what.
Where each part of a Breeze export lands — including the parts that have nowhere to land.
| In Breeze | Lands in pplCRM as | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| First and last name | The person’s name | Matched automatically under most spellings. |
| The person’s email address | Also the duplicate key: a row matching an existing person can merge into their record instead of duplicating it. | |
| Mobile / cell phone | The person’s mobile number | |
| Home phone | The household’s phone | |
| Street, city, state/province, zip | A household at that address | Rows sharing an address land in the same household, so families arrive together. |
| Tags | Tags on each person | Comma-separated values become individual tags. |
| Notes | The person’s notes | |
| Custom profile fields | No matching field | Combine what you want to keep into your Notes column before exporting, or map a column to Tags to keep each value as a filterable tag. |
Then import it, in four steps.
A CSV with a header row — Excel’s save-as-CSV is fine. A very large list can be split into smaller files and imported one after another.
Every column gets a best-guess match you can correct with a dropdown. Unmapped columns are left out — nothing imports by accident.
Rows matching an existing person by email can merge (fills blanks, never overwrites), be skipped, or import as new. You can also tag everyone in the file and add them to a list, so the import stays findable afterwards.
Runs in the background and reports back how many rows landed — with skipped rows downloadable as a CSV that names the reason for each.
Every people import also runs a quiet check on each email address — whether its domain can actually receive mail, and whether it belongs to a throwaway-address provider. Failing addresses stay on the record but are suppressed from sending, so dead addresses from an old export are never sent to.
What does not come across.
Stated here, on the page — not discovered halfway through your move.
There is no donation import in pplCRM. Past gifts stay in Breeze — keep the giving export as your archive of record. Going forward, offline gifts (cash, cheque, bank transfer) are recorded one at a time on the person’s record, and online giving runs through pplCRM donation pages.
The import creates and updates contacts; it never marks anyone as a newsletter subscriber. pplCRM records consent on each person separately, so after the import people are subscribed one at a time from their record — there is no one-click bulk subscribe — or they confirm themselves through one of your signup forms. Plan for this step before your first send.
Breeze is a trademark of its owner. pplCRM is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Also moving from Planning Center, NationBuilder, Mailchimp?
Run your Breeze file on a free workspace.
Start free, import a test file, and see your own people on the screen before you commit to anything. No card required. Stuck on a column? Email us your header row and we’ll reply with what maps.