Best Practices: Searching/Targeting Your Database (And Adding to Lists) - cStreet Campaigns
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Best Practices: Searching/Targeting Your Database (And Adding to Lists)

Whether for sending out eblasts to targeted groups of people or for simply keep tabs on who has submitted stories, you’ll need to search/segment your database.

To do so, go to People and then click on the little funnel icon. Start the process of filtering your list by clicking the “+ Add Criteria” button. You can continue adding more and more criteria until you’ve narrowed down your list to what you’re looking for.

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NationBuilder's search feature is robust, and allows you to be creative in how you target people.

 

For example, say we wanted to find all those who had taken some sort of active interest in the party—whether attending RSVPing for an event, donating, volunteering, etc—to make a call out for volunteers. The search might look like:

(Matches any the following)

  • Add criteria: Activity → Has RSVPed
  • Add criteria: Activity → Has Endorsed
  • Add criteria: Donation History → Has Donated
  • Add criteria: Support Level → Has Volunteered

 

Or say we wanted to find people who had donated over a certain amount, in order to make a tailored high-value donation ask. You search might look like:

(Matches all the following)

  • Add criteria: Donation History → Total Amount Donated → Is Greater Than → $1000

 

One more example: say we wanted to find your most influential social media supporters in order to ask them to share out a specific social graphic you had produced. Your search might look like:

(Matches all the following)

  • Add criteria: Email → Emailable
  • Add criteria: Activity → Has Retweeted
  • Add criteria: Influence → Number of Twitter Followers → Is Greater Than → 2000

 

Once you've performed the search you want, you'll often want to add people to a list so that you can then send them an email, batch update them, etc.

To add them to a list, with the people results displayed, click the "Actions" dropdown on the upper right corner and select "Add all to list". This will bring up your existing lists, any of which you can click on to have all of the people in your display results added to it.

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But if you want to create a brand new list and then add your search results to that, click on the “+ Create list” option at the bottom of the existing lists. Write the list name, and click Create.

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Now just locate that new list amongst the others, click on it, and those people will all be added to it.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Lists only consist of those who fit your particular search criteria at the time that you made your initial search; they DO NOT dynamically update.

So if you make a list of donors, as searched on March 1st, this will not automatically include any people added to your database after that date who match that criteria. So to keep lists up to date, you’ll have to either:

  • Run the relevant searches again, and re-add everyone to the list (don’t worry, NationBuilder will recognize if people have already been added to a specific list and will not add someone twice)
  • Use filters for dynamic searches/segmenting