Audiences - FS Guide

• The main audience page lists all your audiences, the counts of people who match the rules therein, and the date the audience was most recently updated.

  • Note: The number of people matched updates when one of two things occur: either the audience rules are changed and saved or Fireside performs its daily update of the page counts (usually overnight). After Fireside’s daily page refresh, the count displayed for an audience is fixed unless you open the audience and make a rule change and save (also possible to simply open an audience, click the refresh button below save, and save). Thus, it is possible that the number of people matched doesn’t reflect the actual count (if people met the provided criteria during the course of the day, but the audience wasn’t manually refreshed by staff). It must be noted that audiences are dynamic and automatically query the system for matching people based on the criteria set; you need not manually update an audience prior to sending a message to that group. If you want to see the real-time number of people matched before sending, click into the audience and use the refresh arrow below the save button to confirm the number of individuals. 

• You can export an existing audience to a spreadsheet by clicking on the cloud icon and specifying the fields you want included in the Excel file for each of the profiles in the audience.

• The audience editor rules are threefold: a specific field that contains data; the condition for that field to further define the people query; and the value that limits that condition (which can be optional). Examples include:

  • HomeAddressCity > Is Equal To > Arlington: This pulls profiles with a home address whose city is listed as Arlington. 

  • HomeAddressCity > Has a Value > Value Not Required: This pulls profiles with home addresses that have any city listed. 

  • HomeAddressCity > Is Not Equal To > Arlington: This pulls profiles with a home address where the city is anything but Arlington.

• The audience editor is a rule-based system for combining individuals into a list. There are two sets of rules to master to properly use the audience editor: 1) Include vs. Exclude People Matching; 2) Any of vs. All of the following rules.

  • Include people matching means that only the individuals who follow the rules specified below will be included in the audience. If someone does not meet those rules, then they will not be included. Exclude operates the same way, but does so in the opposite direction by removing individuals who meet the criteria specified. Thus, if you create an audience that whose only rule is to include everyone with an email address, you do not need to exclude anyone who does not have an email address. 

    • Sometimes the exclude section can be a really effective and efficient way of “including” people in your audience. For instance, if you exclude all people who do not have an email address on file (Email > Does not have a value), that means that all included people must have an email on file.

  • “Any of“ stipulates that if a person meets even one of the rules stipulated within a section, that person will be included. Thus, if I list that I want to include profiles that have an email and gender marked as female under “Any of,” I may get constituent profiles that have emails who are marked as male and females who do not have an email address because they only need to check off one of the criteria specified. If I were to switch the rule to “All of,” only individuals who have an email address and also are marked as female will be included in the audience. 

    • Note: In the case of the former option, I could exclude males and also pull profiles that do not specify a gender, or vice versa. In the case of the latter, the “All of” already inherently excludes anyone who is not marked as female because in order to be in the audience they must be female.

• You can select “Restrict to District” in an audience to ensure that you have only profiles included who we can confirm, based on the address listed, live within your district. This will automatically remove both individuals whose addresses are outside the district as well as anyone for whom you do not have an address (possible for newsletter subscribers where they’ve only ever submitted an email, for instance).

• Certain profiles will never be included in an audience. These include the login emails for staff Fireside users and agency contacts.