What this helps you do
Audiences group your members so a message reaches the people it affects. You always have one All Members audience that reaches everyone connected and cannot be deleted. Onboarding seeds a small starter set you can rename, archive or replace: Class Updates, Personal Training, Challenges & Programs, Member Events, Open Spots and Instructors & Staff. On top of those you build the audiences your gym actually runs on: a class format, a time slot, a program block, a location, a youth program. Open audiences appear as choices on each member's preferences page; closed ones such as Instructors & Staff are yours to assign and are never shown to members.
When to use it
Use audiences whenever a message concerns one part of the membership: a single class cancelled, an instructor swapped for one time slot, a program block starting, a challenge running, an event with limited places, one location closed for maintenance, or a note that should only reach the people who teach.
How to do it
- Open Audiences.
- Create an audience per class format or time slot that members would recognize by name: 6 AM Strength, Yoga, Spin, Youth Programs.
- Create one per location if you run more than one site, so a closure at one building never reaches the other.
- Choose how people join each one: members choose it themselves, the gym assigns them, or either. Set Instructors & Staff to the gym assigns.
- To nest a time slot inside a format, set Inside audience to the parent, for example 6 AM Strength inside Strength. A child audience only accepts people who are in the parent.
- Let members pick what they want on the preferences page, and use Bulk assign from Connections for instructors, trainers and personal-training clients.
- Decide per audience whether replies are allowed. Leave replies on for anything a member will want to ask about, such as a cancellation or an opening.
Example
At 5:15 on a Tuesday the 6 a.m. strength instructor calls in sick and nobody can cover. The manager sends the cancellation to the 6 AM Strength audience with the 7 a.m. option. The yoga members, the evening crowd and the personal-training clients never see it, so nobody learns to ignore messages from the gym.
Good to know
- Audiences are lists that members choose or you assign. There are no rule-based or dynamic audiences, so a member-list export does not fill a class audience by itself: import, then Bulk assign, or let members choose.
- An audience is not a booking list. Your booking system still knows who is booked into Tuesday's class; the audience is who agreed to hear about it.
- A member who trains in two formats joins both audiences and gets both sets of updates.
- Sending to All Members asks for a step-up confirmation first.
- At the end of a program block, archive the audiences you no longer need; the connections stay.