Fundamentals: Searching

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Overview

Advanced search will cover the basics of finding contacts in your database and understanding how to use actions.

Objectives

Provide users with the ability to find contacts they have recently entered, and to get an overview of the many other ways to search.

Requirements

Experience entering contacts so they can search for specific people to retrieve.

Description

This lesson takes approximately 60 minutes.

Overview of searching. Explain:

There are many different and overlapping ways to search in CiviCRM, each with a different level of precision and complexity.

We will cover the following:

• Quick Search: Demonstrate with:
  • Name/Email: McClelland (explain what happens if you have no matches)
  • Name/Email: fred (explain partial first or last name matches)
  • Email: example.net (explain that everyone has this domain)
  • Actions: Explain that no matter how you search, you always get a set of actions to carry out on the result set.
  • Demonstrate how to select all records, or just a few
  • Demonstrate Print PDFs for contact
• Advanced Search
  • The main interface for searching
  • Explain how to expand/collapse sections
  • Explain that you can use the percent signs.
  • Search on name: fred or joe – show contacts returned, then explain how to return to the criteria, and change display results as contributions. Now a different number. Could be more or less.
  • Show visual feedback on search terms
  • Demonstrate how to modify search terms: First search for everyone who has contributed more than $100. Woops too many. Then add “Last90 days” and it is less.
  • Explain importance of Reset button

Final Exercise

Find number of contacts returned by each of the exercise searches.

Review answers from exercise, questions and answer.