Search for a Contact in Your Community

Before you start

Your Community brings together all your contacts — it's your database.

To get the most out of it, you need to be able to search for any contact — whether a person or a structure — in your database.

Good news: searching is easy with three options — simple search, filter by group, and advanced search. Here's what this article covers:

• Simple search in the Community
• The "Filter by" function to narrow down by group
• Advanced search in the Community
• Can't find a contact in the Community

A picture is worth a thousand words — here are all 3 options:

Please note: everything covered in this article also applies to searching for Structures (a feature available on the Professional plan only).

Running a simple search in the Community

Go to Community > Contacts and type your search in the search field.

This lets you quickly find a contact when you only have partial information about them.

This is a fuzzy search that runs across several fields:

• First name, last name, or email address.
• Address fields (street address, additional address line, city, country).
• Any text and autocomplete text custom fields you've created.

This search is typo-tolerant and handles minor spelling mistakes.

Example: If you search for "Lyon", the results will include all contacts with "Lyon" or something close to it in the fields listed above — for instance, people who live in Lyon, but also people who live on Rue de Lyon in Paris.

Using the "Filter by" function

On the Community > Contacts page, use the filter at the top of the page to display only the contacts that match specific criteria:

• Administration rights
• Membership status (active, past, non-member)
• Donation history (yes / no)
• Membership in a group created in your Community

Once you've filtered your contacts, you can refine your results further using:

• Sorting via the arrows in the table header row,
• Simple search using the text field described above.

To customize which columns appear in the table, use the icon just above it.

Running an advanced search in the Community

This feature lets you combine multiple criteria to narrow down your search.

Click "Advanced search" to open a search panel with several categories:

• Contact information — including both default fields and any custom fields you've added,
• Memberships,
• Donations,
• Static groups — to filter contacts based on their membership in one or more groups.

Select one or more criteria — your Community list updates in real time as you apply them.

To start over, click "Clear fields" to reset your search.

Can't find a contact in your Community

You can't find a contact in your Community, even though you're certain they have an account in Springly.

Has the contact been archived?

If that's the case, the contact may have been archived. You can find the list of archived contacts under Community > Settings, in the Advanced options tab.

From there, you can restore archived contacts if they were archived by mistake.

Does the contact's profile actually contain the information you're searching for?

Say you're searching for all contacts born between 2001 and 2002, but someone you know meets that criteria isn't showing up in the results.

The most likely explanation is that the relevant field — in this case, the date of birth — hasn't been filled in for that contact.