Practical guide

Inventory a community before choosing what to move

Last materially reviewed 2026-09-28

Quick answerList the resources and relationships people rely on before exporting files or inviting members.
What to know

Inventory functions, not everything

Begin with the places members actually use: current discussions, recurring events, reference material and help routes. Record the owner, current location, audience and consequence of losing access. A complete file count is less useful than identifying the one document everyone needs for the next meeting. Keep sensitive membership information out of a general planning sheet.

What to know

Choose a disposition

For each resource, choose move, retain, summarise, retire or review. Give the decision a reason and an accountable owner. A resource with unclear rights or sensitive material should not move by default. A vendor’s migration offer does not settle whether you have permission to transfer every contribution or whether the intended destination preserves the original audience boundary.

What to know

Inspect the retained route

If an item stays behind, write how a member reaches it and who will maintain that access. Test links using an appropriate ordinary-member account, not only an administrator view. If you choose to summarise a discussion, preserve attribution where appropriate and make clear that a summary is not the complete original conversation.

What to know

A fictional inventory

A craft association finds three frequently used templates, an active discussion and five years of inactive announcements. It prioritises the templates and active conversation, retains selected records under an agreed policy and does not publish the entire archive automatically. Its inventory includes an unresolved rights question for contributed photographs. That row remains on hold with an owner, even if the technical migration could copy the files.

What to know

Before you close this task

The final inventory should let another organiser answer three questions without opening every old folder: what matters for the next activity, where it will remain accessible and who can resolve an exception. If an important resource has no owner, leave that row unresolved rather than hiding it in an archive total.

Continue when useful

Next: Content map

Give each retained resource a clear destination and audience before moving it.

Open Content map →

Sources used for this page

These records support the facts and comparisons above. Merchant-controlled records are labelled so you can separate product claims from independent evidence.

  1. Mighty Networks migration FAQ — Merchant documentation · mightynetworks.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-28
  2. Mighty privacy policy — Merchant documentation · mightynetworks.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-28