List Management
Lists are a powerful tool that allow you to specify dynamic segments of your constituents, on-demand. Want Octogenarian Alumni of the Engineering school that did not attend your happy hour last week? No problem!
Once you've got a list, you can export it to Excel (you'll get each person's first and last name, email address, and xid), or send an email to that list.
List Purposes
Lists in AlumnIQ started out as a vehicle for segmentation leading into a mass marketing email. We soon realized that this powerful segmentation utility was useful outside of email marketing, too; eventually resulting in the addition of Purpose classifications.
Every list must be identified as one or more of the following purposes:
Email Marketing
Automated Messages
Event Access Control List (ACL)
Content ACL
Given their wider applicability than originally envisioned, we have plans to extract the Lists feature from inside the Email Marketing module into its own module, but as of right now it hasn't yet been done.
Imported Lists
There are a few types of lists. The simplest is an imported list. Create an Excel spreadsheet and upload it as a new list using the Import Excel File button. We only accept XLSX file uploads. It must have a column with the heading email. Additionally, if you include a column named xid we can map this person back to the warehouse (where a match exists) to enable addtional functionality. Uploaded list xid data must match exactly, including any leading zeroes.
Tip: If your xid's are fixed width with leading zeros, you can force Excel to keep the leading zeroes by applying number formatting to the column and using a custom format of enough 0's to match your xid length.
When you import a spreadsheet you're shown a preview of the data, to make sure it looks how you expected. Once you approve it, that data is static and will not change until you upload a new spreadsheet to overwrite the original.
Filter-driven Lists
The second type of lists are what we call Filter-driven lists. This is where we give you the tools to get amazingly specific in your segmentation. It's time to get excited!
Filters are made of criteria. A criteria is a distinct thing about a person. What's their age? Class year? Lifetime donation amount? Are they an alum? Do they belong to a giving society? Depending on what data you make available to us, we support dozens, even hundreds of potential criteria.
By combining multiple filter criteria together, you can target a very specific segment of your constituents. This is how we get our list of Octogenarian Alumni of the Engineering school that did not attend your happy hour last week.
Essentially, we're building a really big venn diagram, and the intersection of all of the circles will represent our List Members.
You can also use "OR" support to build multiple distinct venn diagrams and create a list that encompases more than one set of criteria. For example, you might be targeting a giving campaign at both Octogenarian Engineering Alumni and Recent Donors who are also Young Alumni. Configured properly, your list will contain anyone that fits into either of those two descriptions. Nobody will be required to be an Octogenarian Young Engineering Alumni having recently donated: As long as they belong to group A or group B, they will be included in the list.
Creating a new filter-driven list
First, create a new list:
Give your list a name that will make it easy to remember who's in it and what it's for. You can use an existing folder or create a new one, to organize lists however you like. You must also select at least one purpose for the list, depending on what it will be used for.
When you first create your list, it may have a few criteria already specified. If they exist, these criteria are identified by your school as the usual defaults. For example, you don't want to email deceased constituents, or people who have specifically opted out of communications.
From here, you can click on the blue "Add Criteria" button in a group to add a filter criteria to that group. The first criteria we'll filter on is Age.
You specify filter criteria in a manner that resembles natural-language, making it very intuitive to add and edit them.
The blue refresh button in the upper-right of the Add/Edit Filter window updates every time you make a change to your filter to show you a live count of the number of constituents that would match the criteria as specified. You can also click it to force a refresh.
Once you're satisfied, click the green Add Filter button at the bottom of the dialog to add this criteria to your list.
A list whose criteria have been modified and not yet saved shows a Preview new snapshot button in the right sidebar, as well as a count of the number of constituents that will match all of the given criteria in the blue box in the top-right of the screen.
Snapshots
Your data is constantly changing! People have birthdays, make donations, get married, change addresses, and so on, every day of the year. These things all affect your warehouse. We have a process that synchronizes your warehouse data into AlumnIQ for usage in things like lists.
A snapshot is a list of the constituents that matched all of the criteria from the list at the moment that the snapshot was made. Lists can either be manually updating or auto-updating, but we'll get to that in a bit.
More filters
Now, our list includes only people in their 80's, and we can see that there are almost 9,000 of them. Let's add more filters. We need to limit to only Engineering Alumni and people that did not attend your last event. Let's start by limiting to Alumni:
Now let's limit to people affiliated with the school of Engineering:
And only people that did not attend your event:
Now that we've built up all of our list criteria filters, let's look at how our list is shaking out:
Recall that we're building a big venn diagram. Each line in the white box represents one circle in the diagram. The intersection of all of the filters will be some number less than or equal to the smallest group.
Go ahead and click that Preview new snapshot button. As the name implies, this does not commit us to the changes, it simply shows us what the changes would look like. The next screen will show you an alphabetically-grouped list of list removals (on the left) and additions (on the right). Clicking each letter's tab will load the list members whose last name starts with that letter. Since this is the first time we've taken a snapshot, they will all be additions.
Now, assuming everything looks about like you expected, click the Looks Good button in the upper right to save this list snapshot.
Cloning blocks
Sometimes you need to repeat an entire OR block with only a minor change. To help make that easier, we've added a "Clone this block" button at the bottom-right of each block. Simply clone the block and make the necessary edits.
Automatic Updates
We built our list! Awesome! Now what?
If the warehouse updates, and we now have more octogenarians, your lists in Manual Updates mode will not update to reflect the freshly minted 80-year-olds. This is done for your protection! When you create a list, you may not want it updating every time the data changes. Maybe you're relying on that data only updating when you tell it to. In that case, Manual Update Mode is for you! You can click the blue Refresh List Members button to update the snapshot manually at any time.
If you want your list to update automatically, click the black button near the top right of the Edit List screen that reads Manual Updates. This will change the button text to "Auto-Updating," and your list will automatically re-calculate the snapshot at key points in time.
A list snapshot is considered recent enough not to need updating if it has been refreshed in the last 24 hours. If the snapshot is more than 24 hours old, and the list is associated with an upcoming scheduled message or being used as an Access Control List for an event, it may be refreshed. Lists for upcoming messages qualify for refresh between 48 and 4 hours prior to the scheduled delivery time of the message and are prioritized by the age of their snapshots, so if two lists qualify the one with the older snapshot is refreshed first.
Other list types
In addition to Email Marketing uses (Imported and Filter-driven lists), lists can also be used for Automated Messages, and to control access to event registration (Event ACL), and pages you create through the content management module (Content ACL). These are each discussed in their applicable section of the documentation.
Deduplication by email
This feature has not yet been released; the documentation is being provided to collect early customer feedback.
Deduplication by email address is a touchy subject. AlumnIQ is designed around the constituent, not the email address because unique experiences (communication preferences, giving history, ask amounts, membership status, and so on) lead to better outcomes.
However, we know that you hear from couples sharing email addresses who complain that they're getting "duplicate" emails - but from our perspective, they're not duplicates. The opt out links and the personalized content are associated with the constituent.
They don't care. All they see are two messages with the same subject line.
We encourage you to use personalization to counter these complaints as much as possible: injecting first name into the subject line and/or body of the message so they are as uniquely experienced as they are technically uniquely addressed. But if that won't fly, and you're out of options, we will let you reduce your list to unique email addresses provided you understand the consequences.
If you hit the magic checkbox to dedupe on email, AlumnIQ will then apply the following to the list:
Remove all list members without an email address
Sort list members by email address, then by XID (ascending), then by first name
Keep only the first instance of each email address
Remove all other list members with that same email from the list
The gist of it is the lowest/first xid with a given email address "wins" and all other xids attached to that email do not. Any other selection process would be far too institution specific to accommodate, and instead we would suggest you upload a hand-crafted list instead.
Again, we discourage the use of this feature. Your reach will only ever decrease, even if the volume of complaints will be lower. Use your best judgment.
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