Andy Burns

People say time is money. I disagree. You can make more money. You can lose money, recover, and earn it back. Time does not work that way. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s that slow paced dinner with friends, the quiet morning, the focused work you actually enjoy. Here’s the deal: That’s why improving how

Most people say they need more time. I’ll suggest they might just need more focus. Before you put up some defenses about how busy you are, please hang with me. Your inbox. Endless social media feeds from “friends” who may never call, listen, or show up. Notifications for every. little. thing. I’ve managed to quiet

CiviCRM is powerful, but ease of use is always an area the software needs to continue to improve to have happy and productive users. That is why I really like these 3 extensions and highly recommend they belong on every CiviCRM install. Recent Items Menu Recent Items Menu keeps recently viewed contacts and other configurable

Clients ask for this all the time: Can I get an email notification when someone submits this form? Yes. In CiviCRM FormBuilder, you can. Most form tools make this obvious. In CiviCRM, the setup is possible, but not neccessarily intuitive to make it happen. Here’s how I often use do it with the form logging

Event planning can get messy when the next step lives outside your CRM and between someone’s memory and a spreadsheet. A presenter submits a proposal. Staff review it. Then someone has to send the right follow-up, track the decision, collect more details, and remember what still needs action. That is how nonprofit operations staff end

Something is behaving oddly or you want to try a small config change. Before you throw it over to an expert, you gotta give it a try. And I’m asking for you to give me 20 minutes. You might fix it during this time, but you will surely learn something and collect facts in case

Your system is complex. Managing the complexity is a key pillar to the state of IT these days. You’ve got layers of abstraction that can be hard to diagnosis what is causing what: CiviCRM extensions, WordPress plugins, custom fields, CiviRules, and all the other settings and logic running in the background. When something breaks, it’s

You can describe your symptoms to a doctor, but you don’t get to diagnose yourself straight into a procedure or surgery. They step back, run tests, and confirm what’s actually going on. Skipping that is malpractice. Plumbers and home repair people take the same diagnostic step first. A problem is something you can reproduce and

It’s powerful. But the first time you open it, the blank screen issue can make people give up. You’re thinking about entities, relationships, and how to pull the right data from a long list of database tables essentially. Having a bit of a MySQL mindset certainly helps. SearchKit is essentially letting you build queries through