When you export from Affinity, what you get is a flat list of contacts and a timeline that reads like a museum placard: all the facts, none of the story. Deals disconnect from the email chains that shaped them. Introductions sever from the people who made them. Notes about family, interests, and context scatter across a dozen fields. A relationship graph that took years to build compresses into CSV rows. This is not a catastrophe if you know what you're looking for. We've guided relationship-heavy teams through this migration—wealth advisors managing generational client networks, founders juggling investor relationships, sales teams where deal velocity hinges on knowing who introduced you to whom. The recovery is systematic: map the data structure you have, identify what Affinity didn't export, establish checkpoints to validate what migrated, and rebuild the connective tissue in your new CRM . Here's how to do it cleanly, in 60 days, without orphaning 60% of your relationship data. The nine fields Affinity exports—and what they actually contain Affinity's export delivers: Contact record: Name, email, phone, company, title. The skeleton. Organization record: Company name, industry, location, domains, funding history. Useful but static. Interaction timeline: Dates, type (email, call, meeting), notes. No content. If you met someone on March 15th, the export tells you the date but not what you discussed. Relationship strength: A calculated score based on frequency. Useful for ranking, useless for understanding why that person matters. Custom fields: Any fields you built. But only if they're populated. Empty fields vanish. Tags: Any you applied. Critical for segmentation—and almost always incomplete. Opportunity history: Deal names, amounts, stages, close dates. The deal record itself, but not the conversations that shaped it. Lists: Segments you created. Names only; membership is re-computed, not exported. Notes: Free-form text. Usually the richest field—and the hardest to parse. What vanishes on export: Email content (only the date and sender/recipient are logged) Who introduced you to whom (relationship provenance) Second and third-degree connections (your contact's network context) Implicit relationship strength data (not just the score, but which interactions drove it) Integration history (Slack conversations, calendar invites, Zoom recordings attached to deals) Soft intelligence (notes about deal velocity blocks, personality traits, preferred communication cadence) Map the three layers of your relationship network before you export Before you touch the export, audit what you have inside Affinity. This takes 2–3 days for teams with 500+ contacts, but it's the difference between a recoverable migration and orphaned data. Layer 1: Organizations and key contacts. Filter your Affinity database to show: All organizations with active deals or interactions in the past 12 months All contacts tagged with your top three deal-drivers (e.g., 'decision-maker', 'warm-lead', 'investor') Any contact you've met more than five times in the past year Export this as a separate file. This is your priority cohort—the relationships that generate 80% of your revenue. You'll migrate these first and validate them hard. Layer 2: Interaction metadata. Pull a report of: All interactions logged in the past 24 months Grouped by contact and type (email, call, meeting) Include the Affinity-calculated relationship strength score This is your baseline for rebuilding relationship depth in Orin. You'll map each interaction type to an Orin activity record and use the timestamp and frequency to reconstruct the narrative arc of each relationship. Layer 3: Deal-contact linkage. Export all deals with: Deal name, amount, stage, owner All contacts associated (including secondaries) Contact role in the deal (e.g., sponsor, evaluator, blocker) Date added to deal This tells you not just who the contacts are, but why they matter to your pipeline. When you rebuild in Orin, this becomes your deal team structure . The migration blueprint: Five checkpoints that catch drift Set up your Orin workspace first. Create the contact structure, account hierarchy, and custom fields that match your Affinity taxonomy. Then run the migration in this sequence: Checkpoint 1: Organization import (Day 1–3). Upload your organization list. Validate: All company names match your Affinity export exactly (no typos introduced during export) Domains are populated and unique (de-duplicate if Affinity exported subsidiaries under the same parent domain) Location fields are parsed correctly (Affinity exports country, city, state separately; Orin's address field may need reformatting) In Orin, use the duplicate detection rule on company domain to catch any org you've already created manually. Link them before you import. Checkpoint 2: Contact import (Day 4–7). Upload your contact export. Orin will auto-match the contact to the organization based on email domain (if you configured that r