Audiences

An audience is a saved set of filters, such as “Members at the North campus” or “Everyone tagged Youth parents”, that a campaign sends to. HoW works out who is in it again every time it is used, and shows you before you send how many people it reaches by text or by email, and why the rest can’t be reached.

How to build an audience

1. In the staff dashboard, open Communications. The Audiences tab opens first and lists your saved audiences, with the filters each one uses, by name: for example Tag: Volunteers or Campus: Downtown.
2. Choose New audience.
3. Give it a Name, and if you like a Description so others know what it is for.
4. Under Who is in it, open Add a filter and choose one:
   • Has a tag: pick one or more Tags.
   • Home campus: pick one or more Campuses.
   • In a group: pick one or more groups. It counts people who are active members of the group’s current season.
   • Membership standing: Visitor, Attending, In process, Member or Inactive.
   • Household role: Adult in a household or Child in a household.
   • Custom field: choose the Field, a Comparison that fits it (for example “is”, “contains”, “is before”, “is yes”, “is any of”) and the Value or Options.
5. Add as many filters as you need. Everyone you add must match all of the filters; inside one filter, any of the choices counts. With no filters, the audience is everyone in your church. To take a filter away, use the bin beside it (Remove filter).
6. Watch Who it reaches as you go. Switch between By text and By email to see the five counts for each (they are explained below).
7. Choose Save audience. The button waits until the audience has a name and every filter is filled in.

To change an audience, click it in the list, edit it, and choose Save audience again. To delete one, choose Delete on its row and confirm. A deleted audience is no longer offered to campaigns; nothing about the people in it changes.

The five counts

The counts are worked out for the channel you pick, By text or By email.

• Matched: everyone the filters match, children included.
• Reachable: adults with a phone number (for text) or an email address (for email) who have said yes to that kind of message. These are the people a campaign will reach today.
• Not agreed: adults who have a number or address, but have not said yes, or asked not to be messaged. These are the people to ask.
• No phone / No email: adults with no number or address on file. Asking will not help; collecting their details will.
• Children: people the filters match who are children. They are never messaged, whatever the filters say.

Reachable, Not agreed, No phone (or No email) and Children add up to Matched. Someone counts as a child when their birth date says they are under 18, or, with no birth date, when they are a child in a household.

Using an audience in a campaign

On the Campaigns tab, choose the audience in a campaign’s Audience list. The campaign then shows Who this reaches today, for example: This reaches 412 of 1,208 people in “Members”. 796 have not agreed to texts, 14 have no number. When the campaign is scheduled, HoW works the audience out again, and it checks each person’s answer once more just before their message goes, so someone who said no a minute ago is not messaged. See Campaigns: email and text for writing, approving and sending a campaign.

Good to know

• An audience is a set of rules, not a frozen list. Someone who joins a group or gets a tag tomorrow is in the audience the next time it is used.
• Agreement is per channel. A person can be reachable by email and not by text. How agreement is recorded is in Agreement to texts and email, and STOP.
• Limits. Up to 20 filters per audience. A name is up to 120 characters, a description up to 500.
• Who can do it. Owners, administrators, ministry leaders and communications managers can see audiences and build, change and delete them. The other built-in roles do not see Communications.

If something isn’t right

• Reachable is much lower than Matched. That is normal at first, especially after moving from another system: people imported from Planning Center arrive with no agreement recorded. The Not agreed count is the list to work through. People, then the Who we can contact tab, shows the same picture for your whole church and opens the list of people behind each number.
• Something a filter names was removed (“tag not found”, “campus not found”, “group not found” or “custom field not found”) when saving: something the audience uses has been deleted since it was built. Remove that filter and pick again.
• Too many filters (“an audience has at most 20 filters”): combine choices inside one filter instead (one Has a tag filter can hold several tags).
• The comparison no longer fits the field (“that comparison does not fit the field’s type”): the custom field’s type changed. Choose the Comparison again.
• Someone you expected is not reachable. Open their record in People and look at the Communication section: they may not have said yes on that channel, may have replied STOP, or may have no number or address. If they have no birth date and are listed as a child in a household, they are counted as a child.

What DCX Logic support can do

Support can go through an audience’s filters and counts with you, and explain why a person is counted where they are. Support does not record anyone’s agreement to be messaged for you.

Coming from Planning Center

Planning Center’s lists are built from rules and conditions in People, and a list is refreshed by hand or automatically before you email or text it. A HoW audience is the same idea with a narrower set of filters (tags, campus, groups, membership standing, household role and custom fields) and is always worked out fresh when it is used, so there is nothing to refresh. Two differences matter when you move: Planning Center lets you choose all, any or none of the rules, while a HoW audience always needs every filter to match; and in Planning Center you add your own “consent to text” condition to a list, while HoW checks agreement for you on every channel and shows who was left out and why.