Better group management in CiviCRM
Besides their original purpose as a way to organize your contacts, CiviCRM groups wind up becoming very useful for a number of things, including mailings and complex searching.
Unfortunately, long-running CiviCRM sites often have hundreds of contact groups that have been created over the years.
And making efficient use of hundreds of groups can be a real headache.
Just finding the right group might take you several minutes of frustration. Each time. (And worse, it's easy to just create a new group when you can't find the right one, which of course means you now have more groups to deal with.)
So here are a few tips to help you make better use of groups and avoid the headaches:
Develop (and document, and use) a naming convention for your groups, so that you can know what each group is for and easily find the right group when you need it.
Have a look at the Temporary Groups extension. Sometimes you just need a group to do one task, like sending a mailing. This extension makes it easy to ensure that such groups don't hang around forever.
Avoid some tricky areas. These are the kind of things that seem really smart when you find out about them, but can be very confusing if you're not careful.
Parent and child groups are tricky until you work with him for a while. Make sure you really need this functionality before you just dive in.
CiviCRM will allow you to manually add and remove contacts from smart groups. I advise against it, because it can be confusing later when you find there are contacts in a smart group that don't fit the smart group criteria.
Here's the thing:
Groups are awesome. You can do a lot with them.
But proceeding carefully can save you a lot of frustration in the long run.
All the best,
A.