How importing your people works

The steps here are stable; exact screenshots will be added once the interface is final.

If your church already keeps its people in a church management system (ChMS), you don’t have to retype everyone into Volunteer Circle. You can import them — and you stay in control of exactly who comes in and where they land.

This is an admin-only feature, and it only ever affects your own church.

A quick note on who sets this up

The person who signs your church up for Volunteer Circle often isn’t the same person who can create API access in your ChMS. That’s normal. These import articles are written so you can forward them to whoever administers your ChMS — they’ll have everything they need to get the connection ready, then hand the details back to you. (Planning Center is the exception: it connects with one click and needs no special setup.)

What “import” means here — and what it doesn’t

A few principles hold for every ChMS, so there are no surprises:

• One-way and read-only. Volunteer Circle reads from your ChMS. It never writes back — nothing you do in Volunteer Circle changes, edits, or deletes anything in your ChMS.
• Per-church and church-authorized. The connection is yours, set up with your church’s own credentials, and used only for your church.
• People arrive as pending. Imported people don’t go live automatically. They land in a pending state for an admin to review and activate first, so you decide who actually joins.
• Re-importing is safe. Run an import again whenever you like. On a repeat run, contact fields are updated, and team memberships are additive — people get added to teams, but Volunteer Circle never removes a membership. Nothing you’ve organized by hand gets wiped out.

You pick what comes in

Importing is selective — you’re not dumping your whole database into Volunteer Circle. You choose which groups to bring over, and you decide where each one lands:

1. Connect your ChMS (see the article for yours, below).
2. Volunteer Circle shows you the groups it can see in your ChMS.
3. For each one you want, choose to create a new Volunteer Circle team, map it to an existing team, or skip it.
4. Run the import. The people in those groups come in as pending, and their group membership becomes team membership.

What counts as a “group” depends on your ChMS:

Your ChMS	You import by
Planning Center	People Lists
Church Community Builder (CCB)	Groups
Breeze	Tags
Rock RMS	Groups

What gets imported

Today, each imported person brings:

• First name
• Last name
• Email
• Group / list / tag membership → becomes their Volunteer Circle team membership

That’s the current set. (We’re scoping additional fields like phone and birthday, but we don’t import those yet — so this article won’t promise them.)

Size limits per run

To keep an import fast and reliable, a single run brings in up to:

• 200 groups/lists/tags (segments)
• 5,000 people
• 20,000 memberships

If your church is larger than that, bring people in across more than one run — selecting different groups each time works cleanly, since re-imports are additive.

Your credentials stay safe

For every ChMS that uses an API key or API user (CCB, Breeze, Rock):

• Credentials are stored encrypted.
• They’re used only to read the groups and people you selected.
• You can revoke access anytime by disabling that API user or key inside your ChMS — no need to involve us.

Planning Center uses a secure one-click authorization instead of a key, which you can revoke from within Planning Center at any time.

Pick your ChMS

• Connect Planning Center — the easiest; one-click, no setup
• Connect Church Community Builder (CCB)
• Connect Breeze
• Connect Rock RMS

No ChMS, or your people aren’t all in one? You can also bring volunteers in by CSV spreadsheet, or add them by hand. (A step-by-step CSV walkthrough is on the way.)

Related

• How the join link works — the other ways people enter your church
• Merging duplicate people — if the same person comes in from more than one source
• Roles explained — why only admins can import