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A list is a reusable set of members and contacts: everyone who joined this year and has not paid, everyone with an active recurring donation, everyone who attended last year’s conference. Lists are what you pick as the audience when you send a newsletter. Built for organisations that send to parts of their base rather than all of it. Replaces the spreadsheet you re-filter before every mailing. Lists live under Administration → Communication → Lists & Segments (/email-lists). They require the newsletter module. Who sees them depends on reach:
  • Organisation-wide communication managers and HR managers see every list and manage the organisation-wide ones.
  • Chapter communication managers and chapter admins manage the lists of their own chapters, and read the organisation-wide lists without being able to change them. See Chapter lists below.
  • Chapter HR managers on their own get no lists.
Lists and Segments index with All, Dynamic and Static chips and a table of lists showing type, audience, subscribed and total counts The index has five columns: Name, Type (Automated or Static), Audience (the profile type), Subscribed and Total, plus edit and delete buttons on each row. Under each name you see who created the list and which chapter it belongs to, or Organisation-wide. A list you can read but not change carries a Read-only badge and has no edit or delete buttons. Chips at the top filter to All, Dynamic or Static, a search box appears once you have more than ten lists, and the table pages at 20.

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Two kinds of list

Automated lists are defined by criteria and re-evaluate themselves. Someone who becomes eligible tomorrow is in the list tomorrow, with no action from you. Manual lists contain exactly the people you put in them, and change only when you change them.
The type and the audience scope are fixed when the list is created. Both controls are locked on the edit screen. If you build a manual list and later want it to maintain itself, create a new automated list.

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Creating a list

1

Describe the audience, or skip straight to criteria

The Describe your audience panel takes a plain-language description of up to 1000 characters, for example “active members in Norfolk who joined this year and have not paid”, and turns it into a name, a scope and a set of criteria, with an estimate of how many people match. It is a starting point, not the saved definition: review what it produced before saving.
2

Name the list and pick the chapter

When your organisation uses local centers (chapters), the Local center field sets which chapter the list belongs to. Organisation-wide managers can leave it empty for a list of the whole organisation. Chapter managers must pick one of their own chapters. If that chapter has sub-chapters, an Include sub-chapters switch appears. See Chapter lists.
3

Pick the type

Automated by criteria or Manual selection. This cannot be changed later.
4

Set the profile type

Members & Contacts, Members Only or Contacts Only. Contacts are people in your database who are not members: newsletter subscribers, past attendees, donors who never joined. See Contacts.
5

Set the member status

Active Only, Inactive Only or All (Active & Inactive). Active Only is the default, so a list silently excludes lapsed members until you widen it. This is the one audience setting you can still change after creation.
6

Add criteria

Add as many as you need. Criteria always combine with AND: every condition must be true. There is no OR and no grouping. A chapter list may have no criteria at all: the chapter is then the audience, and the list holds everyone in it who matches the profile type and member status.
You can also start from Ask Orgo. When an answer there is a set of people, it offers Save as segment (or Open in editor on a list proposal), which opens this builder with your question already in the describe box and the suggestion already running.
List builder with the Describe your audience panel, list type cards, profile type and member status choices, and two filter criteria joined by AND

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What you can filter on

Available criteria depend on the profile type, because members and contacts do not carry the same data. Some criteria only appear when the feature behind them is on:
  • Local center appears when your organisation uses local centers. On a chapter list it is offered only if the list can cover more than one center, because otherwise there is nothing left to narrow.
  • Status is always offered on Members Only; on the contact scopes it appears only when contact statuses are turned on.
  • Adhesion status appears when the adhesion module is on.
  • User type appears when your organisation has user types.
For the two donation criteria, picking a donation value reveals a Product selector so you can narrow to one donation campaign rather than all of them. Choosing “Attended specific event” or “Not attended specific event” reveals an event search.

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Attended an event

Event Attendance counts a person only when their RSVP is marked Attended. Being registered, or having RSVP’d “attending”, is not enough: someone who signed up but whose attendance was never marked, or who did not show up, does not count. Cancelled registrations never count. So:
  • Attended any event and Attended specific event match only people marked as attended.
  • Never attended any event and Not attended specific event match everyone else, including people who registered and did not come, and people who are registered for an event that has not taken place yet.
If a list built on attendance looks shorter than the event’s participant count, check that attendance was marked after the event. See Attendance.

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Membership renewal and adhesion status

Membership renewal looks at fee payments. Renewed means the fee is valid today and the member has paid at least two membership fees. Not renewed means they paid at least once and the fee has lapsed. First-year members and people who never paid are in neither group, so a “not renewed” campaign reaches only lapsed payers. Members who are exempt from the fee are left out of both. Adhesion status looks at the member’s current adhesion application. Initiated is an application started but not yet sent. Pending covers every step still under review. Success and Rejected are the final outcomes. If your adhesion flow has no review steps, Pending is not offered. See Adhesion.

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Operators

Which comparisons you get depends on the criterion, and the Operator dropdown is hidden when only one applies: So “under 18” or “joined after March” are comparisons rather than exact matches. There is no free-text criterion: you cannot build a list by name or email address. For Local center, Is one of matches people whose own center is one of those you picked. Sub-centers only matches people in the centers below the ones you picked, and Including sub-centers matches both. A parent center often has no members of its own, so “Is one of” on a parent alone can come back empty: use Including sub-centers when you mean the whole branch. Several centers or user types in one criterion are combined with OR.

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Chapter lists

When your organisation uses local centers, a list can belong to one chapter. A chapter list only ever contains people of that chapter, plus the people of its sub-chapters when Include sub-chapters is on. Authority flows down the chapter tree and never up or sideways, so the audience of a list cannot be wider than its chapter and its descendants.
  • Chapter managers (chapter communication managers and chapter admins) manage the lists of their own chapter, of the chapters their roles or grants give them, and of every sub-chapter below those. A chapter admin does not reach the parent chapter above their own, nor a sibling chapter. Someone with a parent-level right also reaches their parent chapter and everything below it.
  • Organisation-wide communication managers reach every chapter. Chapter HR managers alone do not get chapter lists, and organisation-wide HR managers manage only the organisation-wide lists.
  • Organisation-wide lists (no chapter) are read-only for chapter managers. They can open one and target it from a newsletter, but they only see the people of their own chapters in it, so its counts and recipients shrink to their reach.
  • Include sub-chapters appears only when the chosen chapter has sub-chapters. Without it, people of the sub-chapters are not in the list.
  • On a manual list, adding someone outside the list’s chapter (and sub-chapters, if included) is refused, and anyone already linked who sits outside it is left out of counts and sends.
  • If a chapter is deleted, its lists are deleted with it, rather than turning into organisation-wide lists.

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Working with a saved list

List detail with total contacts, subscribed, unsubscribed and member status tiles, the active criteria card, and the recipients table with subscription filter chips An automated list over members opens with four tiles: the total, how many are Subscribed, how many are Unsubscribed, and the member status the list applies. The total tile is labelled by what the list holds: Total Members, Total Contacts or Total People. A manual list, and an automated Contacts Only list, show the first three. A list built on Event Attendance shows the total alone, because the subscribed split does not apply to it. Below them, Active criteria spells out the saved definition of an automated list in plain terms, and Recipients lists the people themselves. Chips above the table switch between Subscribed, All and Not subscribed, each with its count, on automated and manual lists alike. They are hidden on a list built on Event Attendance. Subscribed means the person explicitly opted in. Someone who never made a choice counts as not subscribed rather than as subscribed, which is why a list you built by hand can show a Subscribed count well below its total. Campaigns only reach subscribed addresses, so a list whose total is much larger than its subscribed count will send to fewer people than it appears to hold. See Contacts for the three subscription states. Lists over 100 people do not load their members automatically: use Show recipients. The recipients table pages at 50 at a time. On a manual list you also get Add, which searches members or contacts by name and adds the ones you tick, a remove button per row, and, for Orgo administrators only, Add CSV for bulk additions from a file. Adding someone who is already in the list is harmless: the existing entry is kept and the row is reported as skipped rather than failing.
Adding and removing people follows the same rule as editing the list. Organisation-wide communication and HR managers can change organisation-wide lists, and chapter managers can change the lists of their own chapters. If you can only read a list, the Add button and the remove buttons are not shown.
Automated lists have no add or remove buttons. To change who is in one, change its criteria.

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A list is not the same thing as an audience

When you compose a newsletter you pick one audience, and a saved list is only one of the choices: The other five are derived from the platform’s own structures and cannot be saved or reused. Reach for a list when the audience is a question about the people themselves rather than a group, an event or a previous campaign.
Chapter communication managers who cannot send organisation-wide see only two options, Members from a group and From a list. The two database-wide options and event attendees are hidden from them. They must choose one of their chapters for the newsletter, and the list must belong to a chapter they manage or be an organisation-wide list.
Choose From a list and pick the list. The count shown next to the option is the subscribed count, not the total. For an automated list, the audience is resolved again when the newsletter is actually sent, so people who became eligible after you drafted it are included and people who no longer qualify are not. Two boundaries then apply together: the list’s own chapter (and its sub-chapters if included), and the chapter the newsletter belongs to. The audience is the overlap of the two, so a list cannot be used to reach people outside either.
Including sub-chapters is set separately on the list and on the newsletter. A list that covers a chapter and its sub-chapters, sent in a newsletter of that chapter with Include sub-chapters off, reaches only the chapter’s own people. When you pick a chapter list in the newsletter form, the chapter and the switch are filled in from the list.
If a scheduled newsletter’s owner has lost their reach over the list’s chapter by the time it is due, the send is stopped rather than going out wider than they are allowed. One exception is worth knowing: a list built on Event Attendance ignores the subscribed and unsubscribed split entirely, because event mail is treated as informational rather than marketing.

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Deleting a list

Delete asks for confirmation and first checks where the list is used. Deleting a list removes the list and its member links, and nothing else:
  • Newsletters that were sent to it are kept, with their history and statistics. They only lose the link to the list.
  • Drafts that used the list keep existing but lose their audience, so they need a new one before they can be sent.
  • While a newsletter is scheduled or sending on the list, deletion is refused and the dialog names the campaigns. Stop or send them first, then delete.
Earlier versions deleted every newsletter addressed to the list. That no longer happens.

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When a list is not enough

List criteria cover the questions organisations ask most often, and they only combine with AND. If you need something they cannot express, such as a report across several years of payment history, ask about custom database queries: those are set up for your organisation and appear on the statistics page rather than here, behind the analytics query feature and organisation-wide financial managers or explicit query access.