Delayed upgrades: extension compatibility problems

Are you keeping up with CiviCRM security updates? Delaying your upgrades can create more than security problems.

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By now you probably understand the importance of keeping up with CiviCRM security updates, to avoid operating with known security vulnerabilities.

And maybe you’ve taken my general advice about not upgrading needlessly (“chasing version numbers”), to avoid the headache of potentially introducing new bugs into the system.

But it’s worth noting:

• Security issues aren’t the only potential problem with avoiding periodic upgrades.

• “Don’t upgrade needlessly” is good advice; but treating it as “wait as long as possible to upgrade” can get you into trouble.

This week I spoke with someone from an organization who decided — for their own reasons, which I won’t question here — to avoid CiviCRM upgrades for almost 2 years.

Until recently.

A few weeks ago, they finally decided to

• upgrade to the newest CiviCRM version.

• upgrade all extension to the latest versions.

Unfortunately, this led to a problem — specifically with one or two custom extensions.

The problem was this: Since these custom extensions are used only by this one organization, nobody else was working to improve them and keep them compatible with newer CiviCRM versions along the way.

The result?

These extensions aren’t fully compatible with their current CiviCRM version, so now they’re misbehaving.

They’ve now got some tough decisions to make:

• Should they drop the extensions and try to make do another way?

• Should they try to get their in-house tech staff to debug and fix the extensions?

• Should they search for — and then hire — a CiviCRM specialist to do that?

• How should they handle the missing functionality in the mean time?

It’s not an easy situation to be in.

Here’s the thing:

As with your CMS (WordPress, Drupal, etc.), the CiviCRM functionality you rely on is very likely built on a number of extensions.

And when you can’t find a well-supported existing extension that does what you need, custom-built extensions are a fine way to add that functionality.

But then the maintenance of that extension — for as far into the future as you’ll use it — rests with you.

And if you then happen to delay upgrading CiviCRM for a long time, you could be looking at some big surprises when you finally decide to start upgrading again.

See also: Upgrades: the bigger, the harder; CiviCRM upgrade oddities: extension compatibility; and Cooperative customizations.

All the best,
A.

“I never imagined it would be this complicated.”

Even if a system is perfect, it's not especially valuable if the people who use it can't trust it.

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Here’s a comment, lightly paraphrased, from a call I had today with a new client:

If we had planned this out from the beginning, with conversations that included the staff, department heads, and volunteers, we wouldn't be in such a mess now. I never imagined it would be this complicated.

They’re in the midst of a data migration from Blackbaud to CiviCRM, and they’re struggling to have confidence that it will be truly ready to go when they turn off Blackbaud in a couple of weeks.

The one or two people who headed up the migration are — of course — very confident.

Other staff, department heads, and volunteers … not so much.

Looking back, it's easy to see how it would've been a good idea to involve more people in the process from the beginning.

Because even if a system is perfect, it's not especially valuable if the people who use it can't trust it.

Here's the thing:

Hindsight is 2020.
And the future is hard to see.

But common patterns do emerge.
And experience allows us to better anticipate common problems.

Fortunately, you don't have to wait until you're the one having all those experiences.

There are plenty of people going through it ahead of you, from whom you can learn.

Like these folks — who now know that it's good to involve major stakeholders early, and throughout the whole process.

All the best,
A.

Hang on to that owner’s manual

Even systems that work very well can be really hard to use without good documentation.

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Spring is here, and it's time to groom the lawn.

I bought a gas-powered line trimmer a few seasons ago. Weed-eater, grass-whacker, whatever you call it, yesterday it was finally time to dust the thing off.

But the darned thing was fresh out of line. You know, the little plastic filament that actually cuts the weeds — it had just run out.

No problem, I thought, I've got extra line. I'll just wind it onto the spool.

Sorry, not so fast. I just could not figure out how to open up the spool and load the line, even though I’ve done it half a dozen times before.

Fortunately, I have the owner's manual filed away somewhere.

It took me a minute to find it, but once I had that in hand, the whole thing was easy.

I'm not winning any neighborhood awards for Best Kept Lawn, but at least now I can tell where the driveway ends and the yard begins.

Without that manual (or a lot of Googling), I may never have figured it out. Seriously, it wasn’t obvious.

Funny thing, the same concept came up with a couple of clients just today.

They each had a question about functional and well-designed systems that we created together many months or years ago, which for some reason were acting in surprising ways.

For one of them, it was easy enough to consult the Google Doc that contained a detailed explanation of how it all worked, and why it worked that way. So we could see that the system is working exactly as designed (though it may need some changes now, in light of newer developments in their organizational policies).

The other was more of a mystery.

It was built several years ago, and though we had several discussions and training sessions at the time to ensure the client understood it all, there was very little in the way of written documentation.

I had to go back and literally read through the code to understand what was going on.

Not a major problem, but not the most efficient use of time either.

Here's the thing:

When you buy a hammer, it doesn't come with a user's manual. Because it doesn't need one.

But just about anything with moving parts does.

So does customized software.
Or complex configurations.
Or any part of a system that takes more than a couple of words to explain.

Sure, it's wonderful when it's fresh and new and everybody’s happy that it works as needed.

But when questions come up later, you'll be glad that you wrote down how and why it does what it does, and filed that away somewhere for easy reference later.

All the best,
A.

Experimentation

Experimentation.

Learning demands it.

It's how you learned to walk.
It's how you learned any language you speak well.
It’s how you’ve learned anything you’re pretty good at.

Sure, study helps.
Advice helps.
Instruction helps.

But if you're going to master the thing for yourself and your own needs, you must experiment.

So: Are you making time for it?

All the best,
A.

Yes, you can take it with you

Ever tried migrating away from a Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) platform? Some of them make it pretty hard to do.

Sure, you can just cancel your subscription — that’s easy. But can you:

• Export all of your historical data in a usable format?

• Find someone to help you turn that export into something that’s usable elsewhere?

If you can’t, then you’re pretty well locked in. Moving away from that vendor can be all but impossible, no matter how certain you are that it’s time to move on.

Here’s the thing:

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what your “end of relationship” options are … before you begin the relationship?

With open-source tools like CiviCRM, you’ve got options.

• CiviCRM partners, to whom you might be looking to host your systems, are used to this kind of question, and should be able to give you a straight answer in the early stages of discussion — in writing, if you wish.

• The answer, in all but the narrowest of cases, is (or should be, IMO): “Sure thing! If you ever decide to take your CRM systems elsewhere, we’ll package it up and deliver it to you, so that any competent CiviCRM provider will have what they need to keep you moving forward.”

• On top of that, in most cases, it’s not only “when you decide to go elsewhere.” It’s “any time you want a full data dump or export of your entire system, we’ll deliver it to you.”

• Sometimes there’s a fee for such services; sometimes there’s not. It’s worth asking about.

Sure, once you get that package delivered, you’ll probably need help — professional, competent, paid help — unpacking it and assembling it so it’s useful. But that help is available from any number of well regarded other CiviCRM partners (or your own in-house team, or even your selected non-CiviCRM vendor, if you’re leaning that way).

And the critical point here is:

You can take it with you, and (almost always) you can practice taking it with you, at any time.

All the best,
A.

Texting: “What Nonprofits Can Learn from Gen Zers’ and Seniors’ Mobile Habits”

Are you using text messages to reach your audience with effective appeals? You can do this with CiviCRM, and all indications are that you probably should be at least considering it.

The Giving USA Foundation publishes a series of annual reports and updates on philanthropic giving in the United States, and it recently released its “Special Report - Giving by Generation UPDATE”, which highlights several salient points regarding the intersection between age, mobile device usage, and charitable giving.

You can purchase the report for your own use, or you may prefer to see what others have to say about it, such as this article from NonProfit Pro.

Or you can just take my summary of bullet points — hooray for low effort!

Gen Z and Millenials are continuing to grow in charitable giving.

• The Baby Boom generation has long been seen as the bedrock base of charitable donors, but how long can this last?

• Millenials have increased their annual donations by 72% in the last 10 years, compared to Gen X’s modest 8% increase.

• And, Gen Z’s generosity trends, adjusted for inflation, have surpassed the point where Millennials’ giving was in 2015, when Millennials were similar in age.

Everybody’s texting.

• “Everybody knows” the cool kids among Gen Z and the Millenials are heavy mobile users. But 88% of Baby Boomers own mobile phones, and on average use them for about 3-and-a-half hours per day — no small amount!

• Your Gen Z constituents are more likely to respond to text messages from charities that any other channel: 3.8 out of five for text, compared to email (3.6), social media (3.6) and direct mail (3.4).

• Even your Boomer constituents are more likely to prefer receiving a receiving a monthly text message than a monthly mailing (29% for text, vs 19% for the mailing). And that’s up from two years ago, when 23% of them said they were open to receiving a monthly text, and up from just 16% in 2016.

Here’s the thing:

Everybody on the Internet will tell you that SMS has an average open rate of 98% or higher. Some will tell you that 90% of them are opened within 3 minutes. Nobody’s saying where those numbers came from, and most of them are trying to sell you something, so take it with a grain of salt.

But I think that roughly matches my own experience. People read texts.

And,
if Boomers are texting more (they are), and
if GenZers and Millenials are giving more (they are), and
if sending automated and segmented SMS messages is supported in CiviCRM (it is) …

… then … maybe … it’s worth considering how you can start to leverage this whole new (30-year-old) texting thing?

All the best,
A.

“You can't paint dirt”

My grandfather used to say, “You can't paint dirt.”

I thought of it this past weekend while re-painting our backyard chicken coop. That thing had a lot of dirt that needed to be cleaned up before we could paint it.

But grandpa meant something else, too.

I mean, you actually can sometimes paint dirt. But because the dirt isn’t fixed in place, your paint job won't last very long. However beautiful it may be in the moment, your work will amount to lost effort when the dirt beneath it shifts.

This came up again yesterday as I was helping my oldest daughter revise a research paper she's been working on. Trying to polish the language early on, before the major pieces of content are organized and put in place, can not only be wasted effort. It can actually prevent the writer from completing that important task synthesizing the research into a cohesive whole, by getting lost in the details of word choice and sentence length.

The same can be said for your custom-built features and configuration of event registrations, online membership signups, and the like.

Digging in too early on polishing the look and the language will usually result in a lot of wasted effort. What’s worse, it can be a major distraction from focusing on getting the functionality right in the first place. Make it as beautiful as you like, but if it doesn’t function properly, it will create more frustration than joy.

Here's the thing.

Creating new tools and features for your users is an iterative process.

Making it all beautiful is valuable work that will absolutely improve the experience of your users and their willingness to it.

But the more you can focus on building the right functionality first, the better positioned you'll be to have a fixed surface on which to build a beautiful presentation that lasts.

All the best,
A.

CiviCon Admin Training: program and presenters

CiviCon 2025 kicks off with a two-day Admin Training, May 19th and 20th, aimed at folks like you who need to manage CiviCRM on a day-to-day basis.

Here's the lineup of speakers (a great group of legitimate CiviCRM experts whom I've worked with for years), and topics:

Presenters:

Stuart Gaston

Known to friends as Stoob (MatterMost: @stoob), this is Stuart Gaston, with 17 years experience building CiviCRM and website solutions for nonprofits as an employee and self-employed contractor. He's also spent 10+ years as a teacher and is the member of the CiviCRM Core Team responsible for the creation of most of CiviAcademy — the online video tutorial service helping users get the most of CiviCRM.

Noah Miller

Noah (MatterMost: @noah) is a CiviCRM consultant and frequent contributor of improvements to the software. He studied cognitive science and music as an undergrad, then jumped into the world of nonprofit science journalism, where he built his first Drupal websites and CRM databases. He founded a project called outLoud Radio in 2002 to support LGBT+ youth in empowering themselves by telling their stories, and grew the organization over the next 12 years. For the last decade, drawing on his experience using CiviCRM and website platforms for his own social justice nonprofit, he has been helping other organizations get the most out of these powerful technologies.

Allen Shaw

Allen (MatterMost: @twomice) has been helping ambitious organizations meet their development goals with professional CRM solutions since 2001, first with custom-built solutions, and now – for over 15 years – focusing on CiviCRM as a platform that's built from the ground up for community-driven organizations. Allen is a regular contributor of improvements to CiviCRM, the Group Lead for the CiviCRM Extensions Working Group, and author of the Mastering CiviCRM 10-day email course. He also publishes daily mailings to his subscribers as a zero-cost source of inspiration, insights, and stories from the trenches for non-profit leaders.

Ben Walpole

Ben (MatterMost: @ufundo) is a freelance developer and member of the CiviCRM Core Team. He learned the ropes of CiviCRM while working in-house for a small public health charity, and has since worked with a range of UK campaigning/community groups. In his work with the CiviCRM Core Team he has been focused on the new ChartKit tool for no-code visualisations of CiviCRM data; and the relaunch of CiviCRM Standalone as a simpler option for deploying sites.

Program:

The Admin Training program lays out the major components and most common use cases for CiviCRM’s diverse features, covered in an orderly structure, with a mix of live demonstration, discussion, and hands-on exercises for participants.

Day 1, May 19th

09:00 - 09:15 Arrival with coffee
09:15 - 09:30 Introductions and ice-breakers
09:30 - 10:30 Session 1: Introduction to CiviCRM
10:30 - 11:30 Session 2: Organizing Data
11:30 - 11:45 Break
11:45 - 12:15 Session 3: Custom data: organization and usage
12:15 - 13:30 Lunch (provided on-site)
13:30 - 14:00 Session 4: Finding data (Reports, Searches, SearchKit)
14:00 - 15:00 Session 5: Contribute management
15:00 - 15:15 Break
15:15 - 16:15 Session 6: Event management
16:15 - 16:30 Closing Session
16:30 - 17:00 Extra time, to be used for 1-on-1 assistance and answering questions raised so far

Day 2, May 20th

09:00 - 09:15 Arrival with coffee
09:15 - 09:30 Brief recap of Day 1
09:30 - 10:30 Session 7: Duplicate contact management
10:30 - 11:30 Session 8: Communications: mass mailings, scheduled reminders, message templates, etc.
11:30 - 11:45 Break
11:45 - 12:45 Session 9: Membership management
12:45 - 14:00 Lunch (provided on-site)
14:00 - 15:00 Session 10: SearchKit and FormBuilder: Advanced searching and data intake
15:00 - 15:15 Break
15:15 - 16:15 Session 11: SearchKit and Charting: Data analysis and visualization
16:15 - 16:45 Session 12: Flexible breakouts: small groups on specific topics of interest to the group
16:45 - 17:00 Closing Session

If all that sounds interesting to you, you can still register online, for both the Admin Training on May 19-20, and for the main CiviCon event itself on May 21-22.

All the best,
A.

The cost of deferred maintenance

Just because something isn’t urgent doesn't mean it's not important.

Sure, most nonprofits have their resources stretched very thin, in both money and time.

So it's tempting to delay what can be delayed, focusing only on the things that demand our immediate attention.

But the result is deferred maintenance, a deceptively costly approach.

If you don't think it's costly, consider this real-world example:

Kansas State University recently decided to demolish 20 campus buildings, including the indoor swimming facility and the gymnasium, rather than face the expense of catching up on decades of delayed repairs and maintenance.

You’re (probably) not in the business of managing university campus facilities. But your operations do rely on maintaining accurate CRM data and effective tools to leverage that data.

So you’ll need to consider tasks like these:

• Detecting and merging duplicate contact records.
• Documenting and implementing a solid permission scheme for your users.
• Performing security updates.
• Ensuring you have a sound backup system for all data and files.
• Conducting regular trainings to keep your staff up to date with the latest system functionality.

Obviously those are all important and valuable.

But they’re nothing your board will demand that you solve right away. A major donor isn’t going to call you at 5:00 p.m. on a Friday, irate that you haven't addressed these things.

In other words, it's a can that you could kick down the road.

But unless you enjoy demolishing things that have not been properly maintained, I encourage you to make time for the ongoing maintenance.

All the best,
A.

Improving the providers’ registry

Yesterday I shared some highlights of my demo talk showing off the New Mexico Respite Provider Registry, and as promised, here are some additional thoughts on improvments we're considering to make it even better.

To be sure, the New Mexico registry is doing its job quite well. Providers are registering, and folks who need their services are finding help.

So what, you might ask, could be better than that?

If you’re thinking of creating your own provider directory, that’s a great question to ask.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Make it more beautiful

In line with thoughts on the value of good design (and examples) that I’ve shared recently, there’s no denying that a beautiful presentation has significant power to create trust and buy-in among users. — even if precisely quantifying that value can be a challenge.

As an example, take a look at the soon-to-launch New York State respite registry (not my project BTW, just one that was also showcased during our recent presentation at the ARCH National Lifespan Respite Conference). It’s a great example of what can be achieved with a little (or a lot of) judicious investment in typography, color, and stock photography.

2. Add helpful content

First-time visitors to your directory — whether they’re seeking services or offering them — probably won’t already be sold right away on how they’ll benefit by participating.

Adding some instructive information can go a long way. Consider topics like:

• Is this service right for me?

• How does this directory work?

• Are your providers screened, trained, or otherwise specially qualified?

• Why would I want to be listed as a provider?

• Am I qualified to be listed as a provider, and how could I become qualified?

3. Provide testimonials

It goes without saying that you think your directory is useful. But does anyone else think so?

First-time (or fifth-time) visitors may not be so sure.

Trusting one of your providers is an investement of effort on the part of those seeking services.
Creating a listing is an investment of effort on the part of the providers.

Collecting — and sharing — testimonials from both of these groups is an incredibly effective way to let your visitors see the value they’ll get from that investment.

Here’s the thing:

The beauty of a public service provider directory lies in its ability to connect people who really want to be connected. People who may be not able to find each other in any other way.

To make that truly effective, something of a “critical mass” is necessary: Shoppers don’t like to visit a shopping mall with empty stores; and retailers don’t like to maintain stores in a mall with no foot traffic.

By making your directory beautiful, adding helpful content, and providing testimonials from happy folks (both providers and seekers), you can help ensure that there’s a healthy give-and-take of traffic between both audiences.

All the best,
A.

Respite providers registry: demo talk

If you’re interested in building a service provider directory with your CRM data, you might like to take a closer look at the New Mexico Respite Provider Registry as an example.

Thanks to the kind invitation of the folks at the New Mexico Caregivers Coalition (NMCC), I presented an overview of this public directory at the ARCH National Lifespan Respite Conference 2025, last week in Huntsville, Alabama.

The slides for this talk are here, and I encourage you to give it a quick look.

A brief overview of what we covered:

• User experience both for “searchers” and “listed providers”

• Searching by service type, geographical proximity (e.g. “within 20 miles of Santa Fe”), and more

• Easy account creation and profile management for providers

• Registry administration by NMCC staff:

  • Review listings and approve / deny / suspend, etc.

  • Enforce requirements for periodic updating of profiles

  • Staff editing of profiles

• Automatic email reminders to providers who haven’t updated their profiles in X days

• Development of the registry:

  • Time to launch (e.g., ~2.5 months from project start to launch date)

  • Maintenance effort and costs (e.g. ~30 hours of outside support to date, since launching 2 years ago)

Tomorrow, I’ll write again with some thoughts on improvments to make it even better.

All the best,
A.

Building a service provider directory with CiviCRM

Does your organization have members who'd benefit from being listed in a publicly searchable directory?

Think about it:

• The data is already in your CRM.

• Your members are probably already keeping it up to date themselves.

• Making (some of) that data searchable and publicly available is not especially difficult.

If your members are offering services to the public, making some of that information in a public directory is one way your organization could provide a significant value to your members.

A couple of examples, both powered by CiviCRM data:

• The Massachusetts Council on Family Mediation offers visitors their Find A Mediator directory to search for family mediation providers by geography, area of practice, certification, and name.

• The New Mexico Respite Provider Registry allows respite care providers to create and manage their own public listing, which site visitors — folks in New Mexico who are actively seeking respite care — can search by name, geography, areas of specialization, and more.

Each of those examples relies on standard out-of-the-box CiviCRM features, plus some custom development to make it work "just right" per the organization's needs.

Here's the thing:

If you've got professional members who'd benefit from additional exposure to a curated audience that you can attract, then building a directory from your existing CRM data is within your reach — and could be a major point of value in your membership growth plan.

All the best,
A.

The first pancake

A friend from Russia once told me they had a saying in her family:

The first pancake always comes out funny.

I don't know if that's a Russian saying or if it was only in her family.

She was using it as a wisecrack about her older sister who, judging from her reaction, had heard it before. But I must have used it a hundred times myself since then, in plenty of other contexts:

• first draft of a blog post

• first time trying Jiu Jitsu (or dance, or a musical instrument, or a foreign language)

• first time driving a car on the open road

• first time building a report, or configuring online event registration, or almost anything else, in your CRM.

They're all going to "come out funny," unless you just happen to get lucky.

The only way to avoid that is to never get started.

… which is also a good way to avoid the tenth time and the hundredth time, when it finally starts to look good.

Here's the thing:

You can't be trying new things all the time …
And you don't want it to look funny every time …

But if you want to get good at it, you'll have to endure that first-time awkwardness, at least for a while.

All the best,
A.

How to make a sandwich

Could you write instructions to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?

My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Burroughs, once gave us exactly that assignment.

She said, “You write it out. I'll bring the ingredients and follow your instructions precisely.”

Of course, Mrs. Burroughs had a point to make.

She knew as well as we did what the outcome should look like, but she made a point of following our instructions to the letter in a way that would result in anything but an edible sandwich, no matter what we'd written.

We all had a good laugh, and she noted for us the lesson:

When you know what the outcome is supposed to be, claiming that you followed all the instructions is not as useful as showing that you got what you started out to create.

I took home a couple of additional lessons:

• It's easy to get caught up in the details and forget the outcome you're trying to achieve.

• Some things are so simple they don't need explanation. To much explanation can even make it worse.

• Often, there's no “one right way.” It's okay to give it a try and see what comes out.

If I could do the assignment again, I think I’d just write this:

1. Think of what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich looks like.
2. Arrange some bread, peanut butter, and jelly, so it looks like that.
3. If you need help, ask me.

And that's the remaining lesson:

When you can't figure out how to get the results you want, it can help a lot to step back, figure out where you're getting stuck, and ask for help from someone who's done it before.

All the best,
A.

Making CiviCRM beautiful

How important is it that your CRM should look beautiful for your staff?

After all, staff can be trained. And they should, in theory, already be bought-in on your mission. Maybe you don't need to impress them with beautiful design.

But then again, there's no denying that they are people, and are thus susceptible to subtle cues that lead to trust, confidence, and pride in their work.

Or the lack thereof.

Just as you might invest in maintaining pleasant and modern office decor, there are tangible benefits to giving your staff a CRM interface that's it's pleasant to look at.

If you've been running CiviCRM for a while, you may expect it to look something like this:

But with a few simple configuration changes, it could look more like this:

All the functionality is exactly the same, and I would argue that the latter design is indeed preferable.

It just looks nicer.

And if you could have that, for virtually no additional cost or effort, would you want it?

I would.

Here’s how to get it:

1. Navigate to Administer > System Settings > Extensions, and there install the extension “RiverLea CiviCRM Theme Framework”

2. Navigate to Administer > Customize Data and Screens > Display Preferences, and there find the setting, “Backend Theme”; for this setting, select any of the “RiverLea” themes. (The above screenshot uses the one labeled “Walbrook (RiverLea ~Shoreditch/Island)”, but you can easily switch to another if you prefer, or just switch it back to “Automatic” if you want the “old” look.)

Now, isn’t that nice?

All the best,
A.

P.S. The RiverLea extension has been part of CiviCRM since version 5.80.0. And since CiviCRM’s last security release was 5.80.2, I’m assuming you’ve got it!

Be sure it works

Can you guess why I was the first one to register for CiviCon 2025? And for the post-conference sprint? And for the pre-conference Admin Training?

• Because I was worried about space running out? (It could, but that’s not it.)

• Because I was just so excited to see CiviCon happening in the US again? (I am, but that’s not it.)

How about this:

It's because I was the one who created those event registration forms.

Why should that matter?

Before I told the entire world that registration was open for those events, I wanted to be 100% confident that the registration process was solid.

So I logged out of CiviCRM. And visited those forms myself as an anonymous user. And then registered and paid. For each event.

Sure, I didn't have to. If I had skipped that step, everything would probably have been just fine. Probably.

But then again…

I spoke with someone last week at an organization whose main donation page had been broken for months before they realized it. Fortunately, a friend emailed him personally to let him know.

But from our conversation, we felt pretty sure that he would have spotted it long ago, if he had tried making a donation himself after the last time he made changes to that page.

Here’s the thing:

None of us are perfect, and any number of little mistakes can make it difficult or impossible for our constituents to take that next step.

And if they’re having trouble donating, or registering for events, or completing a membership form … you probably won’t hear about it. They’ll just move on to something else.

If you’re lucky, a friend will notice and let you know. Eventually.

But a couple of minutes testing it yourself … that’s usually time well spent.

All the best,
A.

Wait, what’s FormBuilder?

Sometimes I just write stuff and assume folks will know what I’m talking about. Not great, but it happens.

List reader MJ wrote back with a question on my Search Kit. Form Builder. email:

Good morning, Allen! I just wanted to clarify—when you mention "form building," are you referring to the registration forms for our events? If so, I'd be really interested to see what you have in mind.

Thanks, MJ

It’s a great question for me because it reminds me that not everyone is as “deep in the mud” of CiviCRM as I am.

So to explain a little more:

What is this Form Builder you speak of? And can it help with my event registrations?

This is not directly related to event registration — indeed, at this point, it can't handle paid event registrations at all (or any kind of payment). And it's not much related to anything you've probably done in CiviCRM so far — it's a totally new set of features!

FormBuilder is the new drag-and-drop form creation tool in CiviCRM. It's similar to working with Profiles, in that you can specify which fields appear on the form, but it does much more:

• Position fields easily in any order, in a variety of layouts, with the drag-and-drop form editor.

• Create special-purpose forms for data entry by logged in users or anonymous visitors.

• Specify which permissions a user needs in order to access the form.

• Define a specific URL (web address) to access the form

• Easily group fields in sections or boxes with various options for outline style, background color, etc.

FormBuilder doesn't yet support payments, so it's not going to replace your contribution pages or event forms for paid registrations or memberships — but that's on the list of features "soon to come" (whenever "soon" is).

But its powerful layout tools, along with the types of data it supports (activities, related contacts, cases, and more) make it much more flexible than profiles, and useful for a wider array of needs.

For example, I'm using it now with a client who's doing a series of surveys as part of a grant-funded research project, and it's the kind of thing we really couldn't do (or rather, not do as well) with Profiles.

You can find it under Administer > Customize Data and Screens > FormBuilder. It won't hurt to play around with creating new forms if you like, but I'll offer two qualifiers there:

1. Probably best not to modify any existing forms that you find there; CiviCRM is probably relying on those to function just as they are designed now, and fiddling with them could have some surprising and undesirable effects.

2. Getting started on your own is a steep learning curve. The official FormBuilder documentation can help, but even the official docs have trouble keeping up with the rapid pace of improvement in FormBuilder.

So to sum up:

If you've never heard of it, you probably don't want to dive into it. But when you have an unusual need that can't be handled with Profiles, someone who's familiar with FormBuilder might be able to suggest ways that it could help.

I hope this helps!

All the best,
- A.

Starting the relationship

What does it take for someone to progress from hearing about you for the first time to being a repeat major donor?

For most of your supporters, that journey will start off something like this:

1. They hear about you

2. They're interested in you

3. They care about your cause

4. They believe in your work

5. They seek out ways to help

6. They take action to help

That progression is a funnel that decreases in number at each step:

Of a thousand people who hear about you for the first time, something less than a thousand will be interested in you. And far fewer will make it as far as taking action to help.

So part of the challenge here is increasing the number of people who make it from one step to another.

What's even more challenging is this:

At those early stages, you probably won't even know who they are.

This above all else is the reason your communications must be crystal clear about:

• What you do

• Why to do it

• The difference you're making

• One or two bone-simple, "heck yeah," easy, no-commitment ways for them to stay connected (and to tell you who they are).

Because once you've got that, the real relationship can begin.

And without that, you have almost no way at all to help them take that next step.

All the best,
A.

Search Kit. Form Builder.

Form Builder.
Search Kit.

Very powerful.
Relatively new.
Rather complex.
Super flexible.
Rapidly improving.

Have you tried them?
Have you heard of them?
Are you loving them?
Are you frustrated by them?

Frankly I've been unsure how to introduce them to CiviCRM admins.

They're very powerful, but require a good understanding of CiviCRM's underlying data structures —something many non-technical admins don't think much about.

If you’d like to learn more, I've got two options for you:

1. Sign up for the pre-conference Admin Training at CiviCon in May. Both Form Builder and Search Kit are on the agenda.

2. Reply here within the next 7 days, and I'll schedule a free one-on-one session to explore these features with you. Yep, no charge. It's worth my time to learn more about how to explain them to non-technical admins, and if it's worth your time to learn more about the features themselves, then we have a win-win situation. (Space is limited, and it’s first-come-first-served, so don’t wait!)

All the best,
A.

“But we did the work!”

How important is good old hard work? And by comparison, how important is the outcome of all that work?

Here’s a story my grandfather liked to tell:

I was sitting right there on the porch when these two fellas come up the street, walkin’ along in the median, with shovels.

One of ‘em would dig a hole. Then they’d look at it for a minute. Then the other’n would fill ‘er in.

Then they’d walk on and do it again.

Well I hollered out and said, “What in the hell are you two boys doin’?”

And one of ‘em said they was plantin’ trees. Plantin’ trees, he says!

Well I said, “How you figure?”

And he says, “Well, this here’s our job for the city, and we do it like they told us. I dig the hole. Johnson puts in the tree. And Bill here, he fills it in.”

I said, “Where’s Johnson?”

And he says, “Johnson called in sick this morning. Says he’s feelin’ awful. ‘Course, we all know he’s gone fishin’. … But me and Bill here, we ain’t loafers. We show up and do our work!”

Boy, he really loved that one.

But here’s the thing:

It’s a silly story.

Nobody can be so short-sighted as to think that their job is just to do what they’re told, without regard for the actual outcome — can they?

Nobody can get so caught up in the details of their work that they forget to consider whether they’re accomplishing something useful — can they?

Nobody can get so focused on tools and techniques that they forget why they acquired the tools in the first place — can they?

Sure they can. Happens all the time.

Don’t let it happen to you.

All the best,
A.