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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, and the menu entry appears for COMMUNICATION_TENANT. HR_TENANT also has full access. 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. 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 type

Automated by criteria or Manual selection. This cannot be changed later.
3

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.
4

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.
5

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.
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. Local center only appears when your organisation uses local centers. Status is always offered on Members Only; on the contact scopes it appears only when contact statuses are turned on. 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” reveals an event search.

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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.

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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. 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. On an automated list, chips above the table switch between Subscribed, All and Not subscribed. A manual list has no chips: the table always shows everyone in it, subscribed or not, so what you see matches the Total tile above. 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, Add CSV for bulk additions from a file, and a remove button per row. 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 on a manual list requires ADMIN_TENANT, which is a higher bar than the rest of this page. A COMMUNICATION_TENANT holder can open the list and see the Add, Add CSV and remove controls, but those calls are refused. If you manage manual lists, you need ADMIN_TENANT.
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.
Someone whose only communication permission is COMMUNICATION_LOCAL sees just one option, Members from a group. From a list is hidden from them, along with the two database-wide options and event attendees. Local campaign managers send to a group they manage, not to a saved 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. If the newsletter belongs to a local center, that center’s boundary is applied on top of the list, so a list cannot be used to reach members outside it. 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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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 FINANCIAL_TENANT or explicit query access.