Migrate from ELAINE to Twenty CRM

ELAINE Contacts migrate to Twenty Person records. Standard properties (name, email, phone) map directly; custom contact properties map to custom fields on the Person object. We run schema discovery during scoping to confirm all accessible Contact fields per-customer instance, because ELAINE does not publish public API documentation. GDPR enrichment data added via API migrates as custom fields. Person is the core record in Twenty; it is created first so that any related records (Activities, Notes) can resolve the parent lookup.

ELAINE Target Groups are segmentation units with optional nested hierarchies. We map group memberships to Twenty Tags on the Person record. For complex multi-level hierarchies, we flatten the tree into a tag namespace (e.g., Region/Global/EMEA becomes three tags or a dot-notation tag). The customer chooses during scoping whether to use Tags or a custom multi-select picklist field for their segment vocabulary. Group names with special characters are normalized to alphanumeric tag format.

Individual email campaigns (newsletters, transactional sends) from ELAINE do not have a native equivalent in Twenty CRM, which is designed for sales activity tracking rather than campaign execution. We migrate campaign metadata as custom fields on the Person record: last_campaign_name, last_send_date, total_sends, and open_rate. Full campaign content (HTML body, subject line history) migrates as Note records attached to the Person. This preserves the reference data without creating orphan campaign objects.

ELAINE Mail Sequences with multi-step triggers, delays, and conditional branches are automation logic, not data. We extract the sequence structure (steps, triggers, delays, content variations) and deliver it as a written sequence inventory document for the customer's admin to rebuild in Twenty or a dedicated sequencing tool. Twenty CRM does not have a native multi-step automation sequence engine; this is a design difference between the platforms that no migration tooling can bridge.

ELAINE A/B test configurations (subject line variants, content variants, send-time variants) are extracted and documented as a written inventory. Twenty does not have a native A/B testing module for CRM records. We document the test name, variants, winner criteria, and sample size from ELAINE so that the customer's marketing team can recreate equivalent tests in their email sending tool post-migration.

User-created custom fields on ELAINE Contacts and Target Groups require field-level mapping to Twenty custom fields. We audit the full custom field schema during discovery, document each field type (text, choice, date, calculated), and flag any that lack a direct Twenty equivalent. Calculated fields from ELAINE do not migrate as live formulas; we preserve the last-calculated value in a static custom field and recommend rebuilding the calculation logic in Twenty's formula fields post-migration.

Files attached to ELAINE campaigns or contact records are downloaded during extraction and re-uploaded to Twenty as attachments linked to the corresponding Person or Company record. File names and the linked record relationship are preserved. We do not migrate attachment versions if the same file was updated multiple times in ELAINE; the most recent version is carried forward.

If the customer's ELAINE instance includes company-level records (e.g., account contacts with organization metadata), these migrate to Twenty Company records. Company name, website, and address fields map directly. Industry and employee count may need to be created as custom picklist or number fields in Twenty since standard fields for these are not present out of the box (GitHub Issue #13953). We flag this during schema design.

ELAINE Owners (users who created or were assigned to records) map to Twenty User accounts by email match. Any Owner without a matching Twenty User goes to a reconciliation queue for the customer's admin to provision the User before record import proceeds. Inactive Owners migrate with an inactive flag so that historical assignment data is preserved without activating phantom users in Twenty.

ELAINE engagement records (email sends, call logs, meeting records, tasks) migrate to Twenty Task and Event records linked to the corresponding Person. Email content becomes a Note attached to the Person. Call duration and disposition migrate as custom fields on the Task record. Activity timestamps are preserved so that the Person's activity timeline reflects the historical record from ELAINE. We extract engagement data during scoping to confirm volume before committing to a timeline.