What Is the Audience Builder?

The audience builder lets you describe a group of people using filters and save it as a named audience you can use again. An audience is dynamic, so it keeps itself up to date as your people change.

Before you begin

You need admin access to your church dashboard.
Add some people to your directory first, so there is someone to filter.

What an audience is

An audience is a named, saved set of filter conditions that describes a group of people, like "Members in the Young Adults group" or "Anyone who joined in the last 30 days."

Because an audience is built from filters instead of a fixed list, it is dynamic. Churchday works out who belongs every time you open it. When a new person matches your filters, they are added automatically. When someone stops matching, they drop out. You never have to update the list by hand.

Where to find it

Go to the People page. In the left sidebar, click People. The page opens on the All tab.
Open the Audiences tab. Along the top of the People page you will see tabs for All, Tags, Groups, Teams, Households, and Audiences. The Audiences tab lists every saved audience with a live count of how many people are in each one.
Open an audience. Click any audience to open its own page, where you can adjust its filters, see who is included, and rename or delete it.

To start a new one, click New audience.

How the filters work

When you build an audience, you stack filter conditions to describe who belongs:

Conditions in the same group are combined with and, so a person must match all of them. For example, "in the Volunteers team" and "lives in Dallas."
Click OR group to add a separate group. A person matches your audience if they fit any group, so this widens who is included.
Click Exclude to add conditions that remove people. Anyone matching an exclude condition is left out, even if they would otherwise qualify.

As you edit, a live count updates to show how many people match. On the New audience page, you also see a preview list of who they are, so you can check your filters before you save.

The same filters, in other places

You will recognize the same filters outside the Audiences tab:

On the People All tab, click Filters to narrow the list on the spot. This is quick, throwaway filtering with a single set of "and" conditions. Nothing is saved.
When you choose who receives an email, the recipient picker uses the same filters to build your send list.

The full OR group and Exclude options appear when you build or edit a saved audience.

Good to know

Saved audiences are shared across your whole church account. Anyone on your team who can open the dashboard sees the same audiences and can reuse them.
Because audiences are dynamic, the count you see today may be different tomorrow as people are added or change. That is expected.
An audience never changes anyone's record. It only describes who currently matches your filters.