What this helps you do
Audiences decide who receives what, and every send goes to exactly one audience. A member belongs to the whole organization and to their own parts of it, so audiences come in three kinds. An audience your ORGANIZATION ASSIGNS is a part you fill yourself: a committee, the board or council, a member class, a cohort, designation holders, New Members, the registrants for an event. An audience MEMBERS CHOOSE is a list on their preferences page: Member Events, Programs & Learning and Get Involved to start with, and any section or interest group you offer. EITHER suits a home chapter: you put members in their chapter and a member can add another where your rules allow. All Members always exists and reaches everyone currently on your organization's list in this Hub. That is not your membership roll: your membership system keeps the roll.
When to use it
Build your parts before you need them: the chapters members meet in, the sections they follow, the committees and the board that do the work, the cohorts in a program, and New Members for the welcome.
How to do it
- Open Audiences and create one audience per part you actually send to, named the way members say it: Capital Chapter, Mapping Section, Awards Committee, Board, Fall Cohort, New Members.
- Set committees, the board or council, member classes, cohorts, designation holders, New Members and event registrants to organization assigns, so they never appear on a member's preferences page. Onboarding only created the three lists members choose; anything else you leave open can be picked by anyone.
- Set sections and interest groups to members choose, and a home chapter to either.
- When a message concerns a combination, like the program committee of one chapter, create that combination as its own audience and put those people in it. One send never combines or excludes audiences.
- Put people in: Bulk assign from Members, one at a time on the person page, or an audiences column in an import that names audiences you already created.
- When someone's chapter, class or role changes in your membership system, move them here too. Nothing moves on its own.
Example
A society with nine chapters creates each chapter set to either, its standing committees and the board set to organization assigns, and three sections set to members choose. The Coastal Chapter meeting moves: the chapter chair sends to Coastal Chapter only, and the other eight chapters hear nothing about it.
Good to know
- The Hub places nobody in an audience from your membership system: no status, class, chapter or committee column fills one by itself. Only an audiences column naming an audience you already created places a person.
- Seeding Member Events, Programs & Learning and Get Involved created the lists; it put nobody on them. Members turn them on themselves.
- Inside audience is for keeping a long list tidy, one level deep, under an open audience such as a chapter set to either. It is filing only: a send reaches the people in the one audience you pick, never the audiences filed inside it.
- Sending to All Members asks for a passkey confirmation first.
- A member who replies STOP is removed from every audience, including their chapter, committees and sections. If they reply START later, add them back to the parts you assign yourself.
- Archive an audience when a committee finishes or a cohort ends; the people stay.