Mobile Commons: Groups

The Groups function in Mobile Commons allows you to create groups of user profiles. You can use groups to segment the subscribers in your active campaigns and target them with specific messages. For example, you might want to create separate groups for Dog Lovers and Cat Lovers.

Alternately, you can use groups for data analysis. You may, for instance, want to create a group of all profiles with email address populated so you can better understand how text messaging has helped with email acquisition.

There are two ways to create a group: 1) Filtering by criteria on Mobile Commons profiles or 2) Uploading a CSV file.

Create a Group Using Filters

1. Click the Groups sub-tab under the Home tab.
   

   

2. Click the Make New Group button.
   

   

3. Give the group a name (for internal use only). Ensure the Using filters to select profiles radial button is marked. Then click Create.
   

   

4. Create Filters
   

   

   
   
   1. Choose the type of profiles you want in the group. You may filter these types of profiles INTO your group, or EXCLUDE them from your group
      1. All profiles will include all profiles in Mobile Commons regardless of opt-in status.
      2. Active subscribers will include only those profiles that are opted-in and subscribed to an Active Campaign. 
      3. Profiles with no subscriptions will include profiles that are opted in for text messaging, but not subscribed to any Active Campaign. (This status usually occurs from uploading a Group using a CSV file, but not subscribing them to an Active Campaign).
      4. Profiles with pending double opt-in includes any profile which is still pending a confirmation to a double opt-in. This can include phones with valid subscriptions to other campaigns that have never confirmed a double opt-in for a different campaign and profiles that have no active subscriptions, just the pending opt-in.
      5. Finally, you can choose to create a groups of only Profiles that have opted-out or are undeliverable phones (e.g. landlines or mobile phones that have been deactivated). 
      6. Declined Opt-In Confirmation are any profiles that interacted with a double opt-in but replied no to the opt-in confirmation message.This can include phones with valid subscriptions to other campaigns that have declined a double opt-in for a different campaign and profiles that have no active subscriptions, just the decline.
   2. Choose if the Group will contain Profiles that meet the ALL of the filters you create, or if it will contain profiles that meet ANY of the filters you create.  This is like an AND/OR function.
   3. Click the Add a filter link to create your filters. You can create groups by adding and/or suppressing profiles based on filters. 
5. Click Preview. You will see the total number of Profiles that will be included and excluded, as well as the total number of Profiles that will be added to the Group.
6. If this looks correct, click Create Group. If not, you can continue to edit the filters and click ‘Preview” when you’re ready to update again.

Creating a static copy of a filtered group: 

A static version is a snapshot of the filtered group and acts as an uploaded group, you can upload or remove profiles from it later. 

1. Under Group Actions, click "Make a static cop".
   

   

2. You will be taken to the groups' main page and the system will show this message below at the top right corner of the page.
   

   

3. You will need to wait a few mins, reload the page and the static version will show up in that list, if not then the system still working on creating that copy, wait more few mins and reload.
4. The static version will have the word "Static" preceding the name of the original group.
   

   

    

Create an Uploaded Group

1. Click the Groups sub-tab under the Home tab.
2. Click the Make New Group button.
3. Give the Group a name (for internal use only). Ensure the Uploading a CSV file of phone numbers radial button is marked. Then click Create.
   

   

4. To ensure that your group has the correct headers to match to fields in Mobile Commons, you can click CSV template on the right to download a sample CSV, specific to the fields in your account.
5. Upload CSV.
   1. The phone numbers in the "phone" field in the CSV can be any format that is remotely close to a 10-digit US phone number (or 11-digit if you include the leading 1). We will automatically strip punctuation for you from phone numbers, so you can input them with dashes, dots, etc. between the digits.
   2. Zip codes should be 5 or 9 digits
   3. The phone numbers and zip codes must only contain numerical digits (0123456789)
   4. Emails should be formatted according to RFC 5321
   5. All other fields are character fields, with max length of 255 characters
   6. Once you have made any edits necessary, choose the file from your computer.
   7. You can also paste the data,separated by commas into the box. (This is particularly ideal if you only need to create a groups with a few phone numbers.)
      

      

      

6. If you are uploading any new profiles or new data to the group, choose Create/Update Profiles. If you are segmenting existing profiles into groups, choose Segment Only (this option is much faster).
7. Note: If you are creating new profiles/updating data on existing profiles and your list has multiple records for the same phone number with different field values. The first row will get saved, the next rows will be skipped.
8. Click Preview Group.
9. You’ll see an estimate of how many profiles will be in the group. (For example, it will say, “Look for 36 rows to add” if you are creating a group of 36 profiles).  You’ll also see a preview of the profiles that we be added to that group. If this looks correct, click Create Group.
   

   

Subscribe a group to a campaign or opt-in path

Once your group is uploaded you can take a number of actions. But, for most users they will want to subscribe their group to a campaign or opt-in path. To subscribe to campaign navigate to "Group Actions" > "Subscribe to Campaign".

After selecting "Subscribe to Campaign" you'll be brought to a subscription selection window.  There is a drop-down box containing all of your account's campaigns and opt-in paths.

If you subscribe the group to a campaign the users WILL NOT receive a welcome message from an opt-in path but they will become an active subscriber of that campaign and will receive broadcasts and message schedule messages. Campaigns do not have dashes in front of their name on the list.

If you subscribe the group to an opt-in path they WILL receive the opt-in path message IMMEDIATELY. Opt-In Paths have a dash before their name in the drop-down list. 

Group Actions

You can change the profiles in a group by:

• Uploaded Group: Clicking the Upload More People Icon or the Remove People Icon.
• Filtered Group: Clicking the Edit Icon to edit the filters. (Remember: filtered groups update automatically.)
• You can also delete the group by clicking the delete icon. Deleting a group doesn't mean permanently deleting it from the platform, it's just deactivating it. You can look for "Inactive" groups under the response of the (api/groups) API endpoint, copy the ID, and open in the URL OR you can reach out to mc_support@uplandsoftware.com to restore it.
•  Or you can save the profiles in the group as a CSV. 

• Note: Groups are instantly ready to use as soon as you create them. Calculating the number of profiles is what takes a long time to show with large groups, but they are ready to use immediately. And we recalculate groups before they are used, so right before you send a broadcast, for example, the group is recalculated to make sure it's the most up-to-date version at that second. 

Filtering Groups using Exclusions

• You can use group filtering to not only target specific subscribers, but also identify and exclude other subscribers from your group. 
• As an example, you may want to ensure you have a more complete data set for a particular custom field. To do this you would build a group of subscribers WITHOUT that field and target a message to them asking them to respond with their answer. In the example below I'm building out a list of active subscribers in a particular campaign who still don't have a value for "Have Dog". To do this, I set my "include" filter to look for subscribers in the campaign I am targeting and my "exclude" filter to exclude any subscriber who has any value for a particular custom field.
   

  

• Filtering Groups for Multiple Responses
• For any type of custom field you can filter for multiple responses! In your filter area for number, date, gender, yes/no, age, time of day or profile fields you may separate values with commas to return profiles that have multiple types of responses saved to those fields. (i.e. age: 35, 65)

• For TEXT TYPE fields the platform will look for exact matches when filtering. If you would like to filter for multiple potential entries in each field you can do so by surrounding the content you would like filtered with quotation marks and separating those values with commas. If you are filtering for Text Type fields, they are case insensitive-if you had a text type field that was favorite_flavor and you wanted everyone who had Strawberry listed, putting in "strawberry" would pull back every user with strawberry, Strawberry, STRAWBERRY etc.

• If you would like to filter, say people who have the value "one two" stored in a custom field and also people who have the value "one, two" in a field you would enter "one two", "one, two" in your filtered group. This will allow you to pull in multiple versions of a custom field value subscribers may have stored. 

Profile counts in the UI are now updating automatically instead of having to click the "recalculate" button to update the numbers in the UI.

How this works:

•  Once you open a group, the system will start an update/recalculate process in the backend. Next to "profiles", we will show a message & a tooltip indicating that we are currently recalculating the count (Example below).

•  If you reload the page, the updated count will show up. (Screenshot below)

• The "recalculate" button has been removed.
• Note: These counts are accurate within 30 minutes. They recalculate automatically whenever this page is loaded (once 30 min have passed from the last auto-update).