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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

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