Best workflow for cleaning museum membership data before CRM import?

Support and Helpdesk
1

Hi everyone,

I'm working with a museum membership database that has been maintained over several years. The exported CSV contains inconsistent membership levels, duplicate member records, mixed date formats, and phone numbers stored in different formats.

Before importing everything into our CRM, I'd like to clean and standardize the dataset with OpenRefine.

I'm planning to:

  1. Merge duplicate member records
  2. Standardize membership types
  3. Normalize phone numbers and email addresses
  4. Fix inconsistent date formats
  5. Remove unnecessary whitespace and formatting issues

Has anyone used OpenRefine for museum or nonprofit membership databases?

We're also using digital membership card through MembershipAnywhere, so having clean member records before synchronization is important. I'm interested in learning which OpenRefine features or GREL expressions have saved you the most time.