Mastering CiviCRM #5: Online documentation
Finally we can get into something that's specifically about CiviCRM.
… except of course that it's not only about CiviCRM. Any tool with more than a couple of moving parts is going to need some kind of documentation.
And the more complex that tool is, the more smart people rely on the documentation that's available.
Official documentation
CiviCRM's official documentation is free. Free to access, free to distribute to your staff, free to modify and reuse as you see fit.
And if you want to make the most of CiviCRM, you'd be well served by becoming very familiar with what it can do right out of the box.
The documentation is also quite extensive. So it can feel like a lot to consume.
But it's well organized, divided into several Guides covering major areas:
User Guide: For staff members who use CiviCRM's web-based interface as part of their job at an organization.
Installation Guide: For anyone who wants to install CiviCRM on a compatible CMS.
System Administrator Guide: For tech savvy people who install, upgrade, and maintain CiviCRM for an organization.
Training Guide: For CiviCRM trainers who train users, system administrators and developers who would like to learn more about configuring and using CiviCRM.
Developer Guide: For developers/programmers who create and improve functionality within CiviCRM or those wishing to develop for/with CiviCRM.
How to use the docs
Since it covers so much, I wouldn't recommend that you just sit down and read it all. (But if you're a voracious reader with an encyclopedic memory, don't let me stop you.)
Instead, make better use of your time with two healthy habits:
Regularly examine the Table of Contents for each of the Guides, to get familiar with what's covered. You can do it a few minutes every day; or once a week; or even the first day of every month.
Like the student learning a new language who makes a daily practice of "learning" one new word each day, you'll find your knowledge increasing steadily over time.
The purpose here is not to memorize anything — it's good enough that 3 months from now, when faced with a new challenge, you can say to yourself, "I read somewhere about something like this," and go back to the docs for the details.Search the documentation first when you have a question. Each Guide has its own search feature, with which you can turn up a variety of articles on a given topic. Google works, too. Use the "site:" operator to search across all Guides; for example, this search on “mailings”.
Extension documentation
The main documentation page at https://docs.civicrm.org/ provides links to all of the above Guides, and it also links to detailed documentation for dozens of CiviCRM extensions. Take a look, and get familiar with what these extensions can offer you.
You can also search the CiviCRM Extensions Directory for an even larger collection of community-provided extensions. Just because you can't do something easily out of the box with CiviCRM, doesn't mean you have to build it yourself — there's a good chance someone has created an extension that can do what you need (or most of it) without hiring a developer.
Video demos
I’ll tell you that there’s no substitute for consulting the official documentation. But I get it, reading text-heavy manuals is not the easiest thing in the world. For a more passive “show me, don’t tell me” approach, you might enjoy CiviTeacher.com, a paid (and reasonably priced) service that offers a library of CiviCRM video instructionals on a wide range of topics.
I encourage my coaching clients to at least give it a look, and they tell me it's a great resource.
Here's the thing:
CiviCRM is just a tool, and merely mastering that tool is not a very useful goal in itself.
But I assume you've decided to make CiviCRM a key component in reaching the real goals you've set out to achieve — for your organization, for yourself, and for the people you care about.
If that's true, mastering the tool is an important part of reaching those goals.
And the online docs are an amazing free resource to help you do that.
Get familiar with them, consult them often, and you'll be on your way to making smart and informed decisions for managing your CRM.
All the best,
A.