Audiences and Segments

An audience is a saved group of people you can look at, refine and then message. You describe who you want in plain language or build a rule, Muin shows you exactly who matches, and the group stays available to every broadcast, campaign and announcement afterwards.

In Muin the screen is called Audiences; the underlying objects are segments, so you will see both words in exports and the API.

When you’d use this

You want to email everyone who gave last year but not this year.
You are planning a Ramadan appeal and need lapsed donors separated from first-time givers.
You want a volunteer list limited to one city or one state.
You need a list Muin recalculates for you, rather than one you rebuild by hand before every send.

See your audiences

Go to Directory → Audiences. Each row shows:

Column	What it means
Audience	The name you gave it
Type	The kind of audience, plus a short summary of its rule. Audiences Muin ships are marked Built-in
People	How many matched at the last refresh, and when that was, or not refreshed yet
Status	Active or Archived
	A Refresh action, shown only for an active rule-based audience

Filter by name with Search audiences, by Active / Archived / All, and by type. The built-in types are Gave last year, not this · Gave before, not this year · Lapsed · First-time · Gave once only · Gave more than once · Major donor · Recurring · Ramadan · Discovered persona · Custom rule.

Audiences needs the advanced analytics feature. Without it the screen says “Audiences isn’t enabled” instead of listing anything.

Build an audience

Go to Directory → Audiences and click New audience.
Under Describe your audience, type what you want in plain words, for example “donors in Texas who gave last year”, and click Interpret. Muin turns it into a rule you can inspect. Or click Build manually to start from the condition builder.
Under Conditions, assemble the rule. Conditions combine with AND or OR, and you can nest groups for more complex logic.
Watch Preview. It recalculates as you edit and tells you how many people match, with a small sample. “Rule isn’t valid yet” means a condition is incomplete; “Nobody matches these conditions right now” means the rule is valid but currently empty.
Under Save & message, give the audience a Segment name and click Save segment. From there you can Message this audience straight away or open it with View this audience.

What you can filter on

Source	Fields you can filter on
Person	Status, acquisition source, city, state, country, country code, marketing opt-in, preferred channel, preferred language, client number, birth month, birth day, tags, phone, secondary phone, postal code
Role	Role type, module, role status
Contribution (gift)	Gift date, with an optional minimum number of gifts
Giving summary	Number of gifts, total given, days since last gift, first gift date, last gift date, whether a recurring gift is active
Form submission	Submissions a person has made
Employee	Department, job title, employment type, employment status, manager, work location, hire date, tenure in months, whether they have direct reports, plus your own reportable custom fields

Operators available per field include is, is not, greater than, less than, is one of, is not one of, contains, is empty, is not empty and between. Phone, secondary phone and postal code are stored encrypted, so they support exact matches only.

A rule can nest up to 6 levels deep and hold up to 50 conditions in a group. If you need more than that, the rule is usually two audiences.

Open an audience

Click an audience to see who is in it and what uses it.

Who this includes, the rule in plain language, and when it was last refreshed. The member list below it is calculated live, so it can differ slightly from the stored count if someone has given since.
People in this audience, the matching people, up to the first 1,000. Larger audiences say they are showing the first N.
Campaigns using this audience, every broadcast or campaign pointed at it, so you know what you would affect by changing it.

Actions: Rename, Email this audience, Refresh now, Archive or Restore, and Delete.

Fixed lists and audiences that update themselves

Each audience is badged either Updates automatically or Fixed list.

An audience that updates automatically is a rule. Muin re-evaluates it every night at 03:00 UTC and replaces the membership. Refresh now runs the same recalculation immediately.
A fixed list is a hand-picked set of people. It never recalculates, and Refresh now is not offered, asking for one returns an error.

People added to a rule-based audience by hand are kept across refreshes; only the rule-matched members are recalculated.

You cannot edit a rule after saving

Rename an audience freely, but its conditions are fixed once saved, because a scheduled broadcast may already be pointed at it. To change who is included, build a new audience.

Using an audience in a send

Email this audience opens the broadcast composer with the audience pre-selected.
In Communications → Broadcasts and in the message composer, pick a saved audience as the recipient set. A single broadcast can target up to 20 audiences.
Event announcements can target an audience instead of a hand-typed list.
HR benefits enrollment windows can use an audience to decide who is eligible.
An audience can also carry role access, so granting a permission to an audience grants it to everyone the rule matches. That binding is capped at 50 per workspace.

What it affects

Broadcasts and campaigns read the audience’s membership at send time, so a nightly refresh changes who the next send reaches.
Archiving an audience removes it from every audience picker but does not delete it, and anything already scheduled against it keeps running.
Deleting an audience is permanent, and every permission bound to that audience is removed with it.
Merging two people means the merged person is counted once instead of twice on the next refresh.

When it goes wrong

What you see	What to do
“Audiences isn’t enabled”	The advanced analytics feature is off for your workspace. Ask your owner or admin to enable it.
“Rule isn’t valid yet” in Preview	A condition is missing a value or an operator. Complete it and the preview recalculates.
“Nobody matches these conditions right now”	The rule is valid but empty today. Loosen one condition, or check whether you filtered on a field most of your records leave blank, Directory → Data Quality will tell you.
“Couldn’t load your audiences”	A loading failure, not a data problem. Reload the page; if it persists, contact support.
Refresh is refused	The audience is a fixed list or is archived. Neither can be recalculated.
The count on the list differs from the member list on the detail page	Expected. The list page shows the stored count from the last refresh; the detail page recalculates live. Use Refresh now to bring them together.
You need to change a rule	Rules are immutable after save. Build a new audience and point your next send at it.

Next step

Duplicates, Merging and Data Quality, clean the directory before you build a list off it
Communications Hub, send to the audience you just built
Automation Sequences, enroll an audience in a multi-step follow-up