We’ll be learning about Segments in this lesson, which are used to query your data. This might be for lots of different reasons – you might need to generate a list of emails or contact details, or you might want to do some reporting from your CRM about audience data, demographics or attendance.

We’ll take a look at an example first of segment logic, and how you can construct a segment.

We’re using this example of a group of people here who we want to segment, and the people in question have some stickers. So some people have got blue stickers, some people have got yellow stickers, and some people have got VIP stickers. So these stickers actually represent all of the various different attributes that we have stored about people or things in the CRM that we want to create a segment for. Mo down at the bottom has got a yellow sticker and a blue sticker. 

Let’s start off by saying, Find people with a blue sticker. When we do that, we see these people because they’ve got a blue sticker, and we see Mo because Mo’s got a blue sticker as well as a yellow sticker.

Okay, so let’s say, Find people with a blue sticker OR a yellow sticker. So the word OR expands our search out, and now we see people with a blue sticker or a yellow sticker, and of course, we see Mo because Mo fits into both categories. However, if we change that OR to an AND, that narrows our search, and now we only see Mo, because Mo is the only person that has a blue sticker and a yellow sticker. Now, we can take this a step further and we can say, Find people with: (a blue sticker AND a yellow sticker) OR a VIP sticker. So you’ll see that we’ve created two separate sets of criteria here so we’re looking at those things together, and then we’re expanding the search out again to anyone with a VIP sticker. And so we see these people with VIP stickers, and we see Mo, who has the blue and the yellow sticker. Let’s head over to the system to look at this in practice.

You can create your own segments by heading to our Segments tool. We can access this from this lightning bolt on the main menu here. I’d like to create a new segment, so I’m going to Add a Segment.

So, first of all, I’m going to give my segment a name, and I’m going to call this Donors. I can then choose what data, what type of data I’m interested in. In this case, our donors are people, so I’m going to choose People. Okay, let’s go ahead and save this segment. Now, our segment is just like a big advanced search. So what we’re going to do now is add some of that criteria. And when we do that, it’s going to give us all of the custom fields to do with people. Now, I’m going to use the Person Type field, which is a tag field. So we’re searching for people where Person Type has any of, in other words, has a certain set of tags, and I’m just going to choose Donor for my tags there. Okay. Now, at this point, if I have a look at my results, I’m going to see everybody in the system that is tagged with the tag Donor. So this is great, I now have a list of all of our donors, but in order to do anything with this list, I need to know their interests so I can send them relevant communications. To do this, I can layer on some additional criteria to my segment. We have an ‘Interests’ checklist in our CRM, so we can use this to find people with any of the specified interests. Once I’ve added that new criteria, this has instantly updated my list and narrowed it down – so now I have a list of Donors, segmented by their interest in Arts & Culture.

Now I’ve generated my list, I’d like to add a badge to this segment. Badges are available on Pro and above, and they allow us to add a visual cue to our segment. So let’s choose some colors and let’s choose an icon. We can also add a little label for our badge. So I’m just going to match the name of our segment and call it Arts & Culture Donors. Okay, so let’s go ahead and save that badge. So that badge is now linked to the segment. Now when we’re browsing around our CRM, if we happen to see somebody who is a member of this segment, we’re going to see the badge on their profile. And the great thing here is that the badges are dynamic. So as new donors come into our system who’ve ticked that they’re interested in Arts & Culture, they’ll automatically be added to my list. 

This is a really simple example, but we can have very complex segmentation data to find specific groups of people, events, organisations, any type of data in our CRM. And with people and organizations, we can give them these badges so that we’re able to see a very simple visual cue and distill all of that very rich segmentation data into a nice visual cue that means we understand how they engage with our organisation. This is really useful for moves management as well. So to borrow another fundraising example, maybe we’ve got someone who comes to all of our fundraising events, but they’ve not made a donation yet. So they’re a hot prospect to become a donor. But as soon as they make a donation, they’re going to lose that prospect badge, and then maybe they’re going to be a prospect to become a regular donor instead. 

Next we’re going to look at a slightly more advanced example. And before we do, I’m just going to show you some of the data that we’ve got in our system that we’re going to be using as part of this segment. So, first of all, in our programs, we’ve got a Children and Young People programme. We’ve then got this data split into different seasons. So each project in our program represents a different season of events. So I’m going to come over to our first project here, and within this project, we have all of the different sessions that made up that season of activity. When we look at a session, we can see all of the participants here. Now we could add up all of these participants manually if we needed to report on them, but it’s much easier for us to use Segments to do this. So to do that, I’m actually going to use two segments. I’m going to use one segment to find all the events that I’m interested in, and I’m going to use another segment to find all the people that are connected to those events as participants. 

I’m going to come back to my Segments tool. I’m going to Add a new segment. I’m going to call this CYP Summer events, and I’m going to choose Events as the type of data that I’m interested in and click Save. Now, it so happens that this is a really simple segment because all of the events that I’m interested in are connected to one project. So I can just Add some criteria, find the Project custom field, and search for events where the project Has any of and then choose Summer Events. Okay, and so this should give us all of the events. In this case the criteria for our events is really simple, but this can draw from any of the data in your CRM – so sometimes you might be looking for events connected to a specific funder, or between certain dates, or with a certain event facilitator linked to them, or maybe all three of those criteria together.

So that’s our first segment. Now, for the second segment, we’re going to find people in those events. So I’m going to Add a new segment. I’m going to call this CYP Summer Participants, and this time we’re looking for People. Okay, so let’s click Save.

Okay, I’m going to Add some criteria. Now, I mentioned earlier that when we add criteria, we can see a list of all the custom fields, so the custom fields for people in this case because we’re looking for people. If I scroll down this list though, I start to see some other types of fields. These ones that have got these little arrows in are actually connection fields, so any connection fields to do with people. Now, people are connected to events as participants through a connection field called Participants. So I’m searching for people who are Participants in events. And then I could say In any of and I could start searching through all of my different events and select them one by one, but because I’ve already created a segment to find the events I’m interested in, I can choose In segment and here’s that segment I made earlier.

Now if we have a look at the results, we should see everybody that participated in those events. If we look at the Statistics tab, we get aggregated data. And not only do we get some useful demographic breakdowns here, but also because we’re looking at people that attended events, we get information about that intersectionality in our data. So we can see not only how many unique attendees we had, but also how many times those people went to these events.
We can also further break down that occurrence data into attended, absent, and unknown, and we can also click through to view the data. Unknown just means we haven’t taken a register for that session. We can click through to view the facts behind the figures and see exactly which people went to which events and what their attendance status was, and we can also see an attendance record. So that’s how we can take two segments and chain them together to get even more useful data – this example is using attendance records, but we could use any type of connection to build this chained segment in our CRM. As these segments are live, if the data in our first segment changed to include more events, the participant list in our second segment would grow too.
We have various options on our Segment too if we need to do something with this list of people. For example, we have Bulk actions at the top here that would allow us to tag everyone in this list or add a certain connection to their profile.
We can also export them, so if you need to grab an Excel spreadsheet for any reason, you can download that here.

We’ll finish up our training today looking at the Mailouts tool. This is a tool that is available in Pro accounts and above, and it allows you to send bulk email out to contacts within your CRM. Now, this isn’t intended to be a replacement for things like Mailchimp and email marketing tools. We can’t do scheduled campaigns or really fancy templates or fancy reports or anything like that, but this is much better to contact a group of people than BCCing a group of people, and is really great for transactional type emails.
There are several types of mailout we can do. We’re just going to have a look at a Segments mailout today, as we’ve created that segment of people already. So I’m going to click on Send a mailout. I’m going to choose the segment that I wish to send this to. I’m going to add a subject and I’m going to add some content to my email. And you’ll see on the right hand side, we’ve got a preview of the email. This would be your logo here, and your contact information as you’ve set up in your Branding settings,
And when we’ve sent that out, we will see that email appear on a person’s timeline. We can also email people who are participants in an event, and we can also choose to email people connected to those participants, maybe a parent or guardian too.