Fireside State Create an Audience

To create a new audience, first navigate to Outreach > Audiences. Once on the Audiences landing page, click the blue plus button in the top right hand corner.

After you have given the audience a descriptive name, you will need to decide what criteria you would like to include. Go to the Include People Matching section and choose a user field from the dropdown menu. The list of user fields will be organized by category: Casework and Messaging, Tagging, Addresses, Default User Fields, and Custom User Fields.

Once a selection has been made, you will often be able to select a qualifier in the middle dropdown. If we chose Email as the user field, we would be able to select from the following qualifiers:

• Is Equal To - find an exact email address.

• Is Not Equal To - find email addresses that do not match.

• Is Like - find all Yahoo email addresses, all email addresses with the word Frank.

• Has A Value - find anyone with an email address.

• Does Not Have A Value - find anyone without an email address.

• Is Invalid - find email addresses that have been marked as invalid.

• Is Foreign - find email addresses outside of the US.

In the final box, you will be able to enter the specific information you want to match (zip code, correspondence form name, affiliation tag, etc.)

As you build your audience, if you want to see how many people fit your criteria just click "refresh" at the top of the page.

For many audiences, you might want more than one criterion. Add a new line by clicking the plus (+) button at the end of the row and follow the earlier steps for each new line you would like to include.

When you have multiple criteria, it is incredibly important to choose the correct joiner: "Any Of" (which means "or") or "All Of" (which means "and"). If you want to find people who are subscribers OR people who live in a certain zip code, "Any Of" is the proper choice. If we wanted people who are subscribers AND live in a certain zip code, "All Of" is the way to go.

You also have the ability to exclude criteria. In the Exclude People Matching section, choose the user field(s) you would like to remove from the audience.

If you want to ensure everyone in your audience lives in your district, you can use the "Restrict..." checkbox at the top of the page to include only the constituents with home addresses that fall in your district. You will automatically remove anyone with an address outside of the district, as well as anyone with an email address but no home address (as there is no way to verify that person resides in your district). 

Composite Audiences

Sometimes you will want to create an audience that mixes and matches different user fields with "any of" and "all of." You can use composite audiences to achieve this effect. Our composite (nesting) audiences feature allows you to include or exclude existing audiences from a new audience.

For example if you wanted to include people that match a set of criteria but live in any one of three different cities. To achieve this, create one audience that includes people matching ‘any of’ the three different cities, and then include the city specific audience as a criteria in your main audience. That audience can list the criteria as include people matching ‘all of’ the following rules.

When creating a composite audience utilizing two or more audiences, it is important to ensure you are properly utilizing the "Any of" or "All of" condition. If you use "Any of" with two audiences as the fields from which the data is pulled, anyone in either of the audiences will be added to the new audience. In contrast, if you use "All of" the individuals added to the new audience will be only people who show up on both of the lists. 

You can only nest audiences one (or more) into another, you can not build an audience from a composite audience.