Adding segments to your appeal

In this article:

Overview

By using appeals in Little Green Light, you can keep track of which constituents have been solicited when and for what purpose, and then manage how those constituents have responded to that specific solicitation (e.g., gave a gift, declined, or did not respond). By doing these things, you'll have greater visibility into the successes of your various solicitations or outreach efforts.

By using appeal segments, you can also group together constituents within an appeal that share common attributes (e.g., giving history or affinity) and create customized communications to each segment, or grouping. In addition, you have the option to assign a default ask amount to each segment.

NOTE: This article assumes you have some experience with creating an appeal, creating constituent lists, creating mailings, and that you understand how searches work.

Add segments to your appeal

Before you add any segments to your appeal, we recommend following these steps:

  • Plan very carefully who you plan to add to each segment
  • Add those constituents to individual constituent lists beforehand
  • After you have created your appeal, add your appeal segments and populate each one by searching for the constituent list that meets the criteria for that segment

To create a new appeal segment, go to your Appeals page, click the name of the appeal you want to add segments to, and then click the Add segment button within the Appeal Segments tab:

Name your segment, provide a description if applicable, assign a default ask amount, and click Save.

Search for and select constituents to add to your segment

Once you've created the segment, you'll want to add constituents to it. Click the Actions button next to the segment and, from the dropdown menu that appears, choose Add Constituents.

Our recommendation is to use constituent lists to build your appeal segments, as described in the previous section. But you can also follow these instructions to use a standard advanced search.

Adding multiple segments

If you want to send a customized letter to different segments within your appeal, you can do that by creating additional segments. In this case, you might have a few different categories:

  • Segment 1: $1000+ donors (donors who've given more than $1000 at any point)

  • Segment 2: $500+ donors (donors who've given $500 or more at any point)

  • Segment 3: Everyone else

Once you have added all of these, you will end up with a set like this one, with a total of 110 unique constituents assigned to the appeal:

Segments are arranged in priority order, which you can change at any point by clicking on either the up or down arrow in the Position column. Constituents can be added to more than one segment list but will only appear in their highest-ranked segment (noted in the overlapping record count in each segment).

Sending mail to a particular segment

You can create mailings for each segment independently, which allows you to customize your communications more easily. To create a mailing for a segment, click on the Actions button for that segment and select Add mailing from the dropdown menu. You can then follow these instructions to create your mailing.

Reporting on an appeal segment

Here are ways you can export data and create a report from an appeal segment.

Canned reports available with the click of a button

Two pre-built reports are available from within an appeal:

Clicking the Segment Summary Export button generates a PDF that displays the giving count and giving summary for that segment. Clicking the Segment Detailed Exports button generates an Excel spreadsheet with columns displaying the constituent ID and name, the appeal segment name, and giving data for the segment.

Creating a custom constituent report on an appeal segment

You can also search on, and generate a custom constituent report from, an appeal segment in the Constituents tab:

From here, you can click the Export results button, and then customize the columns for your report, as you would with any custom report.

Should the constituent total in your appeal's segments match the constituent total in your appeal?

No, not necessarily. 

By definition, every constituent in an appeal segment is also included in the appeal. However, it is not required that every constituent in an appeal be included in an appeal segment. 

It is possible to add constituents directly to the appeal from the appeal's Constituents/Recipients tab, but this action does not cause them to be added to any appeal segment. Adding constituents to an appeal is a separate and manual step in the process. Therefore, it follows that the number of constituents in the appeal can be greater than the total number that are contained in all appeal segments. This explains why you might see a discrepancy between the number of constituents in your overall appeal versus the sum of constituents that are included in your appeal segments.

Removing constituents from an appeal that are not included in any appeal segment

NOTE: It is possible to bulk remove constituents from an appeal only if they are not included in a segment in that appeal. 

To remove constituents from an appeal who are not included in one of the appeal's segments:

1. Search within the appeal, leaving the top-level criteria "Names contain 'blank'" in place, by selecting Advanced Search > Add additional query, and searching on all of your appeal segments. Your search will look like this:

2. Once you have search results containing only those who are not included in an appeal, you can then bulk update those records to delete them from the appeal. To do this, click on the Select button to select all of those records. Then choose the Bulk Edit button and select Remove appeals.

This will remove all of the constituent records from your appeal, where the constituent is not included in a segment.