Andy Burns

You’ve probably had this moment. Someone asks for a report. The board. The treasurer. A committee. You open Find Contributions or a CiviReport template, export the results, rearrange the columns, maybe clean it up in Excel, and send it along. That workflow kinda works, but leaves something to be desired. If you want a little […]

CiviCRM has been around for nearly 20 years. Many organizations still operate comfortably in the tools that have been around for awhile (and evolved extensively along the way). Advanced Search The original cockpit of options and easy to see available fields. Essentially, it’s been the default place people go to. Good for finding contacts with

If your treasurer asks for the same contribution report every month, automate it. In CiviCRM, the simplest path: Build the contribution report in CiviReport > enable Email Delivery > create a Scheduled Job for it. Now it lands in their inbox. Every month. No exports. No reminders. I just had a client needing this for

One distinction I see organizations struggle with is the difference between valuing volunteers and being overly reliant on them for long-term infrastructure. Volunteers are essential. They bring energy, creativity, and commitment to the cause. But they are serving the mission; they are not the mission itself. It’s part of the human condition when identity, ego,

Most clients don’t care logging in CiviCRM, much less the benefits of detailed logging. Until they really do. Sometimes it’s staff or volunteers “trying to make reports cleaner” with a proverbial hammer, data being overwritten or some user mistakenly removing data. In my case, events with participants were deleted. And to be clear, that should

I don’t include email or SMS costs in my managed hosting offering. If you’re sending email through AWS, SendGrid, or SparkPost, you pay them directly. Same with SMS via Twilio. Here’s why. I’m not interested in pass thru costs and adding a markup because it’s not in your best interests. FWIW, this cost will range

When I buy domain names or client’s are needing to secure one, I point them to Cloudflare. More importantly, that’s my go to for managing DNS. Even if a client buys a domain somewhere else, I’ll still point the nameservers to Cloudflare. I do that so traffic is handled before it ever reaches the web

I’ve been using ProtonMail on my andyburns.co domain since 2018 before Civicopilot was a thing. And then I added the civicopilot.com to it as well. They don’t sell, scan or invade your privacy. I’m on their Mail Plus plan at $4 a month, no complaints. But when I set up OS Ticket back in May,

During the October CiviCRM sprint in Lunteren, Netherlands, I made a small extension that fixes one of the minor annoyances I’ve had for years and I think others have too — dashboard reports crammed side by side so you can’t see all the columns without using an inner horizontal scrollbar, at the bottom the report.

Leaving the president’s role up to a fresh vote every year or two brings uncertainty, and sometimes politics into things. And we all want less of that, right? One client I work with built stability right into their structure. They use a three-part presidency model: President-Elect, President, and Immediate Past President. Each person serves one