Life After Portalbuzz: A Migration Guide for Club Leaders

When Portalbuzz shut down in 2024, thousands of club leaders lost more than software. They lost the place their club’s history lived — rosters going back decades, meeting records, event archives, club websites. If your club was one of them, or you’re still limping along on whatever you cobbled together afterward, this guide is for you.

It’s written by people with a personal stake: MemberDay was founded by the same team that created Portalbuzz. When Aplos (which acquired Portalbuzz in 2022) shut the platform down, we watched clubs we’d served for years scramble. So we rebuilt — from scratch, on modern technology — and made “give Portalbuzz clubs a home” the founding mission. The full story is on our Portalbuzz page.

First, triage: where’s your data?

If you still have Portalbuzz exports (member lists, event history, financial records), you’re in good shape — skip to the migration checklist. If you don’t, all is not lost:

• Check with past officers. Secretaries and treasurers often downloaded rosters or reports for offline use. The most recent export wins.
• Reconstruct from adjacent systems. Your email tool, payment processor, or district reports often contain most of the roster. Dues records live in bank statements.
• Ask your members. A simple “confirm your info” form recovers a surprising amount of data — and doubles as an engagement touchpoint.

Whatever you recover, get it into a spreadsheet. Perfect formatting doesn’t matter; any competent platform (ours included) will clean it up during import.

The migration checklist

Moving a club to any new platform comes down to five steps:

1. Export or gather everything. Members (with contact info, join dates, member types), current committees and officers, upcoming events, and any files worth keeping. Don’t over-curate — storage is cheap and history matters.
2. Choose the destination with the long term in mind. After a forced migration, the question that matters most is: will this platform exist, and will it improve? Ask who owns it, how it makes money, and what its pricing does as you grow. (Our answer: founder-owned, flat $29/month with no per-member fees, and a public feature set that ships improvements continuously.)
3. Let the platform do the import. With MemberDay, you send us whatever you have — exports, spreadsheets, even messy ones — and our team imports your member roster from it free, typically within a week. You shouldn’t be hand-typing rosters in 2026.
4. Rebuild the public face. If your club website died with the old platform, stand up a new one connected to your portal, so events and news publish themselves. Our Website Builder add-on exists for exactly this; one club’s site built on it won its Kiwanis district’s website award.
5. Relaunch to members deliberately. Announce the new system at a meeting, onboard members to the mobile app in person, and celebrate the history you preserved. A migration handled well is a membership-engagement moment, not just an IT project.

What Portalbuzz clubs notice in MemberDay

Former Portalbuzz clubs will find the philosophy familiar — one place for members, events, committees, communication, and the club website — running on a modern engine:

• Real mobile apps (iOS and Android) for every member, included
• Zero payment markup — connect your club’s own Stripe account and keep 100% of dues
• AI built in on the Plus plan: an assistant that knows your club’s data, plus AI-assisted surveys and documents
• One flat price, no per-member fees — $29/month or $319/year, no setup fees, no contract

And the part that doesn’t show up on a feature list: it’s run by the same people, who answer support personally and have served this community since 2003.

If your club is still “temporarily” on spreadsheets

Two years is past temporary. The longer a club runs on spreadsheets and group email, the more its institutional memory concentrates in one or two heroic volunteers — and the harder every officer transition gets. You don’t have to accept that as the permanent state of things.

Start a free 45-day trial, send us whatever data you have, and we’ll handle the move — free, like we’ve done for clubs in exactly your position. Come home.