Andy Burns

I recently started being a part of the CiviCRM Ambassador Program — informal, no-pressure conversations for new prospective users to see what CiviCRM could do for their organization. Shortly after the CiviCRM Core Team published “Forget beer, let’s talk pricing” article, I had two CiviCRM exploration calls — literally back to back — that showed […]

A client recently posted a ticket that felt like a bug: The membership report shows nothing. But Advanced Search finds them. What’s going on? Initially, it felt like a permissions issue. But after going down a rabbit hole of financial ACL’s, the answer became apparent— the “missing” members were all lifetime members. No payments, no

I have to say, I’m more on the purist side of CiviCRM. And it kinda comes down gold ‘ole freedom. That’s also part of the open-source ethos — the ability to use the software how you want to, without restrictions, with accessibility and sovereignty built in. For instance, at the top of the civicrm.settings.php file

I was at the Neuschwanstein castle, sitting on a bench reflecting for a while. A lady walks up and says “I gotta take a picture of those faces. I’ll put it into Gemini and it’ll tell me what they mean!” (There were 5 faces way up on the castle wall). She proceeds toward a small

We’re surrounded by noise. Every content feed, inbox message, every notification competes for attention with clever tricks, emojis, and AI-generated content. Heck, most of emails in my inbox are broadcast content that’s not tailored to me; the email from a human as a personal note that make me take note is pretty rare. But people

🚨 Another email subject line 🚨 You’ve seen it with generative AI the quick fix for mass blast emails or social media posts; emojis dropped in to make content look exciting. Red alarms, sparkles, flame icons. It’s meant to cut through the noise, but more often it just feels like noise itself. The problem isn’t

I normally take Flixbus when I travel in Europe. It’s inexpensive and has wide coverage, so it’s pretty popular too. But for some reason I got myopic while in Germany on using trains and booked a ticket on the ICE train from Berlin down to Nuremberg. Initially I thought I made a mistake, it was

I recently received this question from a client running events every week. They wanted to send an introductory email about the sessions without the typical event confirmation email message template info: I created a smart group for an upcoming study group. Can I use it so new registrants get the introductory email automatically, or is

In my last note, I laid out the problem with hourly billing: it shifts all the risk onto you and has a tenuous connection to outcomes. So what’s the alternative? Fixed-price projects. Here’s why they work better for both sides: Think about it: why would you want to pay more for someone to take longer?

I’m going to say something that might be totally alien to some of you, but paying hourly can have little to do with the outcomes you want. It only feels normal because we’ve been conditioned by an industrial revolution mindset: punch in, punch out, pay by the hour. That may have worked on a factory