Acknowledgements

This course has been kicking around in my brain for at least five years. Making it happen has been deeply fulfilling to me personally, and I would like to recognize and thank the people in my life who have helped make this possible. Thanks first and foremost to my partner, Danielle, a constant source of support and guidance and an inspiration for following a path of lifelong learning and teaching.

Thank you to my former colleagues at the Human Rights Campaign for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime and providing patience and support along the way. Particular thanks are owed to:

• Mickey Handwerger and Christal Jones for bearing the brunt of my beginner questions
• SB Birnie and Michael Austin for helping me see where I fit in
• Ann Crowley, Susan Paine, and Jim Rinefierd for trusting me with more responsibility

I'd like to thank the team at ROI Solutions, producers of the CRM on which I first cut my teeth writing SQL in production: Gina Vanderloop, Matt Rosen, Jim Knizer, and John McCarthy for answering an uncountable number of questions (and killing off a number of dubiously-coded queries). Thanks also to my former colleagues at Integral, where I was given the opportunity to hone my expertise and to teach: Jim Emlet, Kevin Moran, John Blackwell, Rattana Srijadsadarak, Snehal Datta, Yao Wan, Stephanie Soriano, Sam Lichtman, and Sarah Holko.

Thanks to my friends at AKWire, Andrew Giffen and Kate Hollandsworth, for their feedback on an early draft of this course and for their constant encouragement.

This site was built using a modified version of the Evidence open source BI platform. Thanks to the team and contributors to Evidence for building such a powerful product.

The entity-relationship diagram of the database used in this course was generated using DBDiagram, a wonderful tool for rapidly prototyping data models with simple syntax.

Finally, thanks to the nonprofit fundraising community: small but mighty, overworked, and always trying their best to make the world a better place, one dollar at a time. I love what I do, and I'm only able to do it thanks to this community of hard working and incredibly talented people. I sincerely hope this course helps you all dig deeper, find skills you didn't know you had, and use them to accomplish your missions both personally and professionally. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.