500 contact groups?!

Here's a question I got from a client this week (paraphrased here for a broader audience):

Hey Allen. We have so many contact groups in CiviCRM that it's getting really hard to manage. It's hard to find a particular group, and sometimes we pick the wrong one, which of course creates problems for us. I figure we could probably delete 90% of them, but it's hard to know which ones aren't being used. You have any recommendations to help us clean this up?

A closer look shows that this team has nearly 500 active contact groups, and around eight staff members with access to create groups. They've been running CiviCRM for over 5 years, and many of the groups were created by people who don't even work there anymore.

It's a tough situation, the kind that just gets worse with time:

Staff who can't find the group they want may just be inclined to create a new one. And the more of them there are, the harder it is to get in there and sort it all out. And the snowball keeps growing.

So, what to do?

This won't be solved overnight, but you can do it with three steps over time:

1. Create a naming convention for groups.

Make it so simple that any staff member can understand it, and communicate it clearly to all staff members. Be sure to explain why it's important that they stick to this naming convention going forward.

A simple naming convention I recommend is this:

Every contact group must have, at the end of its title, the date it was created.

CiviCRM already records who created each group, and even displays that in the Groups listing; this will be useful as well.

Knowing the creation date and creator name will give you some real advantages:

  • It's easy to see how old a group is, which can indicate something (though not everything) about its present usefulness.

  • It's easy to remember to use Alice's group for one thing and Bob's group for another thing, even if they have similar names.

  • When you're not sure of the purpose of the group, you know who to ask.

2. Wait a while, and then start disabling groups.

After a few weeks, you can verify that your staff are actually using the naming convention, and you can distinguish newer groups that use it from older groups that don't.

You can now begin the clean-up process. Start with the groups that seem pretty obviously unused.

But don't delete them. Just disable them. This gives you a chance to re-enable them if it turns out someone misses them.

Optional but awesome: When you disable a group, add "disabled on [today's date]" to the title. This makes it easy to see how long a group has been disabled.

3. Schedule a periodic review

Just as you do for cleaning up duplicate contacts (don't you?), schedule time to review your groups — 30 minutes every week or two should be enough. The number should be shrinking over time, so this will get easier as you go.

Start with groups that have been disabled for a few weeks. Nobody has missed them, so you can delete them outright.

Move on to groups that you're less certain about. Disable a few, and see if anyone misses them.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Here's the thing:

The large number of groups here is a result of two things: multiple users creating groups without always knowing what other users are doing; and a CRM that has been around for a while.

Your CRM software is your own — you own it. It gives you all the freedom you could ever want, and with it some burden of maintenance.

A good naming convention and basic staff training can go a long way to keeping it useful for everyone.

And a little clean-up now and then is just part of owning anything: your house, your car, and your CRM software.

All the best,
A.

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