Beyond Advanced Search

Your constituent data loses a lot of its value if you can't access it in the ways that are useful to you.

So let’s talk about searches in CiviCRM.

CiviCRM’s familiar Advanced Search tool is great for what it does. But when it's not enough for your needs, here are three other tools you might want to try:

SearchKit:

This relatively new feature really is the future of searching in CiviCRM.

(In fact the excellent search tools I mention below are getting harder to find in newer versions of CiviCRM, as the focus shifts to SearchKit.)

With SearchKit, you really can build just about any type of search you might think of.

And it’s not just for finding contacts, either. With SearchKit, you can search for any type of record in CiviCRM: participants, contributions, cases, even more obscure things like line items, notes, and option lists.

The hard part is: SearchKit presents a rather steep learning curve, requires very careful thinking on your part, and assumes you have a pretty good idea of how CiviCRM structures its data internally.

Nonetheless, I do have some fairly non-technical clients who are getting what they want from it.

So you may want to give it a try.

You can find it directly under the search menu at Search > SearchKit.

Include/Exclude Search

If you're making active use of groups and tags, you may sometimes want a list like one of these:

• All contacts who are in Group A but are not in Group B.

• All contacts who are in any of Groups A, B, and/or C; but who are not in tagged with any of Tags D, E, and/or F.

Yes, you could also do this with SearchKit, but the Include/Exclude Search provides a very simple and straightforward interface. So it's more limited in what you can do, but much easier to use.

Traditionally, you should be able to find this under Search > Custom Searches > Include/Exclude Search.

But newer versions of CiviCRM have been hiding this menu item, so you may need to access this (and a few other so-called “Custom Searches”) directly from the URL:

• WordPress:
  ://[example.org]/wp-admin/admin.php?page=CiviCRM&q=civicrm%2Fcontact%2Fsearch%2Fcustom%2Flist&reset=1

• Drupal:
  ://[example.org]/civicrm/contact/search/custom/list?reset=1

Search Builder

Search Builder allows you to find contacts according to very complex AND, OR, and NOT criteria.

Because it's a little more open-ended in its purpose, the interface is a little more complex than the Include/Exclude Search. So you'll need to think a little more carefully about turning the question in your mind into the criteria to use in this search.

But it's still a lot easier to use than SearchKit, and a lot more powerful than Advanced Search.

Traditionally you will find this under the Search menu at Search > Search Builder. But because newer versions of CiviCRM have begun hiding this menu item, you may need to access it from the URL directly:

• WordPress: ://[example.org]/wp-admin/admin.php?page=CiviCRM&q=civicrm%2Fcontact%2Fsearch%2Fbuilder&reset=1

• Drupal: ://[example.org]/civicrm/contact/search/builder?reset=1

Here's the thing:

When you need a search that you can't perform with Advanced Search, then you've probably got a complex set of criteria that requires careful thought.

But if you expect the search results to be valuable in your work, it may be worth the extra time and effort to get familiar with the above search tools.

All the best,
A.