Advanced Search / Report Builder

    BigContacts offers a variety of reporting options. The reports tab gives you the ability to perform advanced searches, create a group email or group task, create custom reports, and access a variety of system reports.

    The Advanced Search area is where you can perform a query on any field within your contact database.  It is a very powerful tool that will help you to filter through your database and get just the list of contacts that you are looking for.

    Performing an Advanced Search 

    Note: The Advanced Search feature is meant to help you build a specific/ filtered list of contacts and not to pull up or export your entire contact list.  For a quick list of your contacts, click the "Contact List" button at the top of the screen.  If your search is too broad, the system may not be able to process the request using the "Advanced Search/Report Builder."

    1. Click "Reports (1)" on the left panel and switch to "Advanced Search/Report Builder (2)".

    2. Check off the fields you'd like to include in your report

    3. In the "Filtering Conditions" column, use the drop-down menu to choose how to filter this particular field.  The default is "Contains," which is the most common option as it will search for contacts that contain any part of what you will be entering into the box to the right (in the "Value to match for the field" column).  

    The other Filtering Conditions are: 

  • "Is" (Must be an exact match), 
  • "Is Blank" (looking for contacts who have NO data in the field you selected to the left in the "Field Name" column), and 
  • "does not contain" (looking for contacts who do NOT contain the value you will be entering into the box to the right in the "Value to Match" column).


4. Depending "Value to Match.  Depending on the field name you chose for the row, you may see a drop-down menu, radio buttons, or a date selector, but the most common will be a plain text box.  This is where you enter (or select) a value you would like to filter by based on what you have selected in the previous "Filtering Conditions" column.

5. After you have selected all of the fields, filtering conditions, and field values for your advanced search, click the "View Contacts" button to run the report and list the contacts below.

6.  You will be automatically redirected to the "Manage your results" section. Here you can perform the following actions for the populated list. 

  • Create Group Task
  • Send Group Email (up to 100 contacts per group email)
  • Add Group Note
  • Save Custom Report
  • Export to Excel or PDF