Using the Lists App

Lists let you carve a working group out of your contacts - the people you're calling this week, donors above a threshold, volunteers in one county - and hand that group to specific people on your team.

A list is more than a filter. A filter is a question you ask the grid; a list is a durable thing with a name, an owner, an order, and notes against each person on it.

Adding Lists to your workspace

1. Click the Apps icon in the left sidebar.
2. Click Browse at the upper right.
3. Click the Lists app.
4. Click Add to Workspace.

Lists now appears in your sidebar.

Creating a list

1. Open Lists and click to add a list.
2. Choose the list type - Dynamic or Static. This is the decision that matters most; see below.
3. Choose the contact source:
   • All Contacts
   • A saved View - the filtered view you already built in the contacts grid
   • A tag
   • Individual contacts, found by search
4. Give it a name and a description.
5. Assign it to one or more users.
6. Click Add List.

Dynamic vs. static

Dynamic lists keep matching their source. Contacts that start meeting the criteria join automatically; contacts that stop meeting them drop off. Behind the scenes the list is watching for contacts being added, updated, and removed, and re-evaluating as it goes.

Use dynamic for anything ongoing. "All donors in the last 90 days" should be dynamic, because you want it to still be true next month without anybody rebuilding it.

Static lists are a snapshot. They capture whoever matched at the moment you built the list, and then stop changing.

Use static when the group needs to stay fixed - an event invite list, a specific outreach push, an audit. Anything where "who was on this list?" is a question you'll want to answer accurately later.

Getting this backwards is the most common Lists mistake. The test: would you want somebody added to this list automatically next week? Yes means dynamic. No means static.

Assigning lists to people

Assignment is the other half of what Lists is for.

Give a list to a user and it becomes their work queue. They can see it, work it, and record notes against each contact on it - without wading through the whole database or needing access to everything in it. For a volunteer coordinator handing out call sheets, or a manager splitting a prospect list across a team, this is the point of the app.

A list can be assigned to more than one person when several people are working it together.

Ordering and notes

Contacts on a list carry their own order, status, and notes.

The order is yours to set, and it travels: if you feed this list into a Connect session, that session preserves the list's ordering, because the order you curated it in is the order it should be worked in.

Notes recorded against a contact on a list stay with that list. You can see how a specific push went without that detail getting lost in the contact's full history - and the next person to work the list sees the context from the last one.

Using a list elsewhere

A list isn't a dead end. Once built, it's an audience:

• Connect - use the list as a session's contact source, ordering preserved. Note that a Connect session takes a snapshot of the list's membership, so later changes to the list won't flow into a session you've already started.
• Email Marketing - use the list as a campaign audience.
• Dispatch - use it as a P2P texting audience.

This is the usual pattern: build the group once in Lists, then point whichever outreach tool you're using at it.

Removing a list

Deleting a list removes the grouping, not the people. Every contact on it stays exactly as it was, along with all their activity - you're throwing away the folder, not its contents.

The notes recorded against contacts on that list do go with it, so if there's context there worth keeping, capture it before you delete.