Affinity's strength is its relationship graph—the web of connections between people, companies, and deals. But when you export that graph as CSV, you don't get a network. You get a flattened list. Critical metadata evaporates: relationship strength signals, connection chains, deal associations, and the hierarchical tags that made your pipeline navigable. A typical Affinity export kills 40–60% of the context that made your relationships valuable in the first place. If you're moving to Orin, Pipedrive, or another platform, or if you've lost faith in Affinity's roadmap and want to preserve what you've built, this playbook walks you through a structured 60-day rebuild. We'll map what Affinity exports and what it doesn't, show you which fields translate, and give you a recovery workflow that brings relationship depth back. What Affinity's CSV export actually contains—and what it loses Affinity stores relationship data in three layers: the contact (person or org), the interaction (email, call, meeting), and the relationship signals (affinity score, last touch, deal stage association). When you export to CSV, you get layer one. Layers two and three stay in Affinity. Here's what exports do include: Contact name, title, company, email, phone Custom fields (if you mapped them; if not, they're blank) Tags (usually flattened into a single cell, comma-separated) Company-level data (industry, size, location) List membership Here's what exports don't include: Interaction history (emails, calls, meetings) Affinity scores or relationship strength signals Deal associations and pipeline stage Relationship type metadata (who introduced whom, warm vs. cold) Historical ownership or assignment Private notes or internal flags This gap is why a 500-contact Affinity export feels like 200 contacts in your new platform. The names are there. The signal is not. The 60-day rebuild: Five phases Phase 1: Audit and map (Days 1–7) Before you touch the export, understand what you actually have. Run a full Affinity export. Go to Settings → Export and pull your entire contact database as CSV. Count your contacts by segment. Open the CSV. Add a pivot table counting by company, industry, and tag. This tells you whether you're moving 200 hot prospects or 2,000 cold outreach targets—the rebuild strategy differs wildly. Identify your custom fields. In Affinity, note every custom field you've created. Check whether they exported at all (many don't). If a field is blank in the CSV but you use it heavily, you'll need to backfill it manually or rebuild it via API. Map your tag taxonomy. List every tag you use. In Affinity, tags are flat; in most other platforms, they're hierarchical or multi-select. Decide now how to translate them. Example: 'warm-inbound-product-fit' becomes three separate tags in Orin or Pipedrive. Consistency here saves 20 hours of downstream cleanup. Identify orphaned relationships. In your new platform, you can link people to deals and companies. Affinity does this natively, but the export doesn't preserve the links. Flag which contacts must stay connected to which deals. Phase 2: Prepare your destination (Days 8–14) Set up your new CRM to receive the data cleanly. If you're moving to Orin or Pipedrive, this is crucial; a messy import poisons your pipeline for months. Create your field mapping document. Build a Google Sheet with three columns: Affinity field name, destination field name, transformation rule. Example: Affinity: company_name → Orin: organization → Rule: Keep as-is Affinity: custom_field_budget → Orin: estimated_deal_value → Rule: If null, mark 'unknown' Affinity: tags → Orin: tags + labels → Rule: Split by comma, create tags for each Audit your destination's mandatory fields. Most CRMs require at least email and company name. If your Affinity export has 300 contacts with no email, you need a supplemental data source (LinkedIn, Clearbit, your sales team) or a plan to batch-enrich them later. Create your custom fields in the destination. If you use a 'relationship strength' field in Affinity, create it in your new platform before import. This prevents the data from landing in a wrong field or being lost. Set up your deal structure. Decide how deals map. If Affinity deals are 1:1 with your sales stages, recreate those stages in your destination. If they're looser, plan to rebuild deal metadata after import. Phase 3: Enrich and dedupe the export (Days 15–28) A raw Affinity export is almost never clean enough to import directly. This phase takes 10–14 days and saves you months of downstream noise. Check for duplicates. Open your CSV in a deduplication tool (or manually if your list is small). Affinity's fuzzy matching lets duplicates slip through. Catch them now. Fill critical gaps. If 15% of contacts have no email, decide: enrich them using a third-party API (Hunter, Clearbit, RocketReach), mark them as 'research-phase', or delete them. Don't import blank emails; they clog your CRM. Standardize phone numbers. Affinity of