Book Image

Using CiviCRM - Second Edition

By : Hommel, Murray, P Shaughnessy
Book Image

Using CiviCRM - Second Edition

By: Hommel, Murray, P Shaughnessy

Overview of this book

CiviCRM provides a powerful toolbox of resources to help organizations manage relationships with constituents. It is free, open source, web-based, and geared specifically to meet the constituent relationship management needs of the not-for-profit sector. Beginning with broader questions about how your organization is structured, which existing workflows are critical to your operations, and the overarching purpose of a centralized CRM, the book proceeds step by step through configuring CiviCRM, understanding the choices when setting up the system, importing data, and exploring the breadth of tools available throughout the system. You will see how to best use this software to handle event registrations, accept and track contributions, manage paid and free memberships and subscriptions, segment contacts, send bulk e-mails with open and click-through tracking, manage outreach campaigns, and set up case management workflows that match your organization’s roles and rules. With specific emphasis on helping implementers ask the right questions, consider key principals when setting up the system, and understand usage through case studies and examples, the book comprehensively reviews the functionality of CiviCRM and the opportunities it provides. With this book, you can help your organization better achieve its mission as a charity, industry association, professional society, political advocacy group, community group, government agency, or other similar organization and position yourself to become a power user who efficiently and effectively navigates the system.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
15
Index

Search

As important as it is to understand and become familiar with the contact record interface, we also need to be able to quickly find records in the system. We started our exploration of CiviCRM by looking at the quick search field in the navigation bar. Navigate to Search | Find Contacts; this path extends to allow filtering by contact type, group, or tag. Beyond this basic search, CiviCRM provides four power tools for searching and providing additional diverse functionality through the reporting system.

Quick search

Quick search is found in the navigation menu and is best used when you are looking for a specific contact. The text entered into this field will search the contact name and e-mail address (by default). When you click on the search box, a menu will expand with additional options for searching various fields. This search will return results for partial matches as you begin typing. You have the option of configuring the tool to use full wildcard searches or only ending wildcards...