Searches

Aim

By the end of this session, you should understand how to Search.

Objectives

Specific objectives:

• Understand how to create and run and interpret the results of:
  
  • Quick Search
  • Basic Search
  • Advanced Search
  • Full-text Search

Learning points

You should aim to cover the following points in this session

• What searches are and how they are created/edited
• Understand difference between component searches for contributions and membership versus contact searches for contacts with contributions and/or memberships
• Look at some example searches in use
• Learners should create their own searches and consider how their own organisation would use searches

Extra points that it would be good to go into, if there is time include:

• Changing the Search results profile
• Custom Searches
• Search Builder

Session plan

This session should last 60 minutes.  Without the exercises, you should be able to complete it in 30 minutes.

Demonstrate to the learners how searches work and then ask the learners to complete the exercises

Basic concepts (30 minutes)

Explain to the the group that searches are one way to display information about a few or many contacts, with Reports the other alternative.

Review the following searches:

• Quick search
• Basic search
• Advanced search
• Full text search
• Search Builder
• Custom Searches

Briefly review that there are searches that work for other objects in CiviCRM than contacts, namely:

• Find Contributions
• Find Memberships
• Find Participants

Explain the way that adding more criteria will reduce the number of results.

Exercises (30 minutes)

Then ask the learners to explore the search functionality as much as they can. They should be encouraged to explore and if useful questions are asked maybe relay the answer to the whole group.