Blog posts by andie

Last week was a busy one for the CiviEvent Widget plugin for WordPress.  Not only did it cross the 2,000 download threshold, but new features were added to help you display upcoming events in a flexible way.

Read more for a summary of what's been added.

Your CiviCRM installation may have undead contacts.  Contacts are marked as deceased in CiviCRM by setting the is_deceased column to 1; living contacts are marked with 0.  However, it's possible for import mistakes to cause contacts to have a value of null for is_deceased.  The result is that the contacts don't appear as dead when you view them, but they're excluded from mailings and other features that filter on is_deceased = 0.

My colleague Tommy has been leading our response at AGH Strategies for Civi911 calls that come in, and he's noticed a few common themes.  I suspect that you may encounter some of these same issues, and this might save you some time and money in addressing problems that crop up on your CiviCRM site.

Compare your fundraising success last year with other CiviCRM users and small- to medium-sized nonprofits.  Third Space Studios have been conducting the Individual Donor Benchmark Survey for three years, helping smaller nonprofits compare their aggregate fundraising information to get a fix on how successful they are raising money from individual donors.

I'm writing from the third day of the post-CiviCon code sprint in Truckee, California.  With 36 participants, we've divided into several groups focused upon making the upcoming CiviCRM 4.5 release as stable and useful as possible. Led by Dave Greenberg and Yashodha Chaku, our group has tackled several bugs and limitations, yielding a number of improvements in just a couple of days.

Hello from Washington, where we've finished our first day of the 2014 Nonprofit Technology Conference events--halfway through the User and Administrator Training. 

(Read more about what's going on here this week at my previous blog post.)

Going to the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference in DC this week?  Join us at several CiviCRM community events!

It's starting to thaw here in DC now, so I'd like to bring you thoughts of spring—specifically a series of CiviCRM trainings to help you and your colleagues get the most out of your system.  My colleague Jane Hanley and I are gearing up for a busy season of programs.

One of our clients was wrestling with getting WordPress events to display within their event calendar, and I finally had enough.  We really just needed a simple WordPress widget that displays upcoming CiviCRM events.