Searching and Reporting

CiviCRM provides several tools to help you obtain a quick snapshot of your members and search through your members based on various criteria.  From the main sidebar menu, select CiviMember to view the membership dashboard page. This page contains two blocks of information providing a summary of your membership categorized by type and date range, and a list of recent member activity.

 

All of the summary numbers are hot-linked, allowing you to drill down and view a list of members who have joined or renewed over the last two months, the year-to-date, or are considered current according to the membership status definitions.

The Find Members page displays a series of searchable fields to help you segment and locate membership records. It is important to note that searching using this tool will display a list of membership records. So if a certain contact has multiple membership records meeting your search criteria, the contact will be duplicated as all their membership records will be displayed. This is in contrast to the advanced contact search tool which displays one row per contact (i.e. there would be no duplicate listed, even if a contact had two membership records meeting the search criteria).

Toward the bottom half of the form are a series of date range fields. The left column indicates the From value and the right column the To value so you can narrow down searches to between two particular dates.  If you are interested in membership records before a certain date, only use the to field.  Conversely, if you are interested in membership records after a certain date, only select the from field.

At the top of the search result set is a shaded block with tools to take action on all records in the result set or those selected using the checkboxes in the leftmost column.

 

The actions are as follows:

• Batch Update Members Via Profile: Use this option to edit multiple records in a table grid using a pre-defined profile. If you are not familiar with how profiles work, you will want to investigate how they are created before using this function. As you use this tool, note the following:
• You must have a profile created before using this option.
• Your selection of contacts must be of a single contact type. You cannot edit Individual and Organization type contacts simultaneously.
• You may only edit a maximum of 100 records at a time. If your search result set exceeds 100, use the record selection checkboxes to edit a single page of records at a time.
  
• Delete Members: Delete their membership records from the database. Note: you are NOT deleting the contacts only their membership records.  This action cannot be undone.
  
• Export Members: After selecting this action you will have the option of exporting a default set of primary fields or choosing which fields to export. When selecting which fields to export you may save the mapping for future use. The data is exported in CSV format and can be easily modified further in spreadsheet software or used for document mail merges.
  
• Send Email to Contacts: After searching your records, you may send an email to selected contacts and include data field tokens. Tokens are placeholders that are filled with the contact's data when the email is sent. This is incredibly valuable as you are able to send a bulk email to contacts while customizing it to each contact (e.g. beginning the email with a personalized salutation).