This article provides comprehensive guidance on creating and managing audiences in Tivian Communicate XI (CXI). It covers the definition of audiences, types of audiences (targeted and basic), methods of importing employee data (via API or CSV file), creating targeted audiences, managing active audiences, updating CSV files, creating sub-audiences, and setting up basic audiences. The article also includes detailed instructions, best practices, and important considerations for each process.

Information

Before you begin

Before you start building a Communicate Journey, consider who it is you want to reach with your communications. Is it your entire employee population or a specific employee group? Do they have email or are they deskless workers? Are they in a specific location or department?

Who you want to reach will determine how you build your audience within Tivian Communicate XI (CXI).

What is an audience?

The term “audience” is used to describe the group of people that are communicated to via CXI. When employee data (such as email, phone number, department) is uploaded into CXI for automatic and direct sending of email and texts, we call it a targeted audience. When no employee data is used, and emails are manually forwarded from the platform, we use what is called a basic audience for reference when viewing engagement behavior results. Additionally, audiences can be filtered further within a Communicate Journey in order to send varying messages to different groups within a targeted audience. We use the term sub-audience for this kind of segmentation.

What you can do with an audience is dependent on how much data is uploaded to CXI. The more employee information that you provide, the more capabilities you can access. Uploading audience data allows you to do the following:

• Tailor a targeted audience for a specific Communicate Journey.
• Reach deskless employees by sending text messages to their mobile phones.
• Personalize email and text messages with the recipients first name.
• Schedule messages and polling weeks in advance.
• Generate deeper insights into employee engagement by using company-specific filters to narrow your data.
• Craft messaging for specific audience groups, so that employees are receiving relevant messages specific to them.

Basic Audiences – These functions listed above are not available with a basic audience. A basic audience contains only a number representing the employees in that audience and is used for reference in the Analytics section. A targeted audience contains contact information and is used to send messages directly to employees.

Employee Data

Tivian recommends that you begin by importing all the data for every employee at your company from your HR information system. This will be available to Communicate Messages as well as any Communicate Journey within your company’s account and will be the data source for creating smaller, more specific audiences for each Communicate Journey.

There are two ways to import employee data: through a custom connection using CXI’s public API; or, by directly uploading a CSV file of data you downloaded from your HRIS system.

Employee data from our Public API

Tivian offers a public API that your company can use to automate data integration between your companies’ HR system and CXI. Once this integration is set up, your employee data can be automatically imported into CXI and updated when changes occur. New hires, people changing roles, and people who leave the company will be automatically added or removed from your employee data on a daily basis.

The API automation requires a technical set up by your IT department and Tivian. It is usually set up when your account is created. If you would like more information on this process, please contact us.

Once set up, the API automation will appear as the employee data source in the Audience Creation and Management area of the Preferences section in your Communicate Journey.

Employee data from a CSV file

If you are unable to use our public APIs, you can manually upload a CSV file, containing your employees’ necessary information. Unlike the HRIS Connector, if your employee information changes, an updated CSV file will need to be uploaded.

CSV’s are also a quick way to upload a test audience or an employee list that cannot be created by filtering with your columns. Members of a multi-departmental task force would be a great example of this kind of list.

CSV file requirements

• Files must be in the CSV format. (Spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers can save spreadsheets as CSV, by using the Save As function.)
• Your columns must have headers.
• Separate columns for “first name” and “last name” are required to activate the personalized greeting in emails and texts.
• There must be at least one row of data below the column headers.
• At least one column must contain email addresses or mobile phone numbers.
• Groups that you want to filter by must all have unique values, even across multiple columns. (i.e. if you have a City column and an Office column, make sure that the office value is distinct from the city, for example “Yokohama” and “Yokohama Office”)
• We recommend including the date in the file name so you know when and if you need to update it. Keep a copy of the CSV file, so you can reference and update it later if needed.

Mailing Lists and Group Aliases – Do not include group mailing lists in your CSV. Group list emails may not get delivered and you will be unable to properly segment the analytics data.

Include additional columns for filtering and segmentation

Adding additional columns of information allows you to enhance your campaign messaging strategy. We don’t limit how many columns you can include. The information in these different columns allows you to segment your audiences using rules in the targeted audience creation process. For example, if your CSV contains office locations, then you can use this information to target messages to employees in specific locations. This same information will make it easy to answer common questions like, “How do my campaign results differ from one office to another?” Useful and common additional columns might include employee first and last name, office location, geographic location, division, and job role.

CSV file templates

Click on the icons below to download sample CSV files. One contains example data if you would like to practice creating targeted audiences and sub-audiences.

Click to download a blank CSV file 

Click to download a CSV file with example data

Upload the CSV file of employee data to CXI

Once you have created your CSV file, you will be ready to upload it to your CXI account.

1. Login to your account and navigate to any Communicate Journey. All audiences are available to all Communicate Journeys.
2. Click Preferences in the menu on the left side of the screen. Scroll down to Audience Creation and Management.
3. Click Create New.
4. In the pop-up window, select Targeted Audience.
5. Name your audience file and click Upload CSV.
6. Select your CSV file.

7. Read and accept the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use:

8. Then choose or confirm the columns that contain email addresses, phone numbers, and employee name:

If you DO NOT wish to include personalized “Hello, [First Name]” greetings in your emails and texts, select Not Applicable from the Employee Name dropdown menu.

9. Name and date your data file, and save it. You’re done!

Note: In order to keep your entire employee list available, don’t click Add Filters for this first upload. You will be able to filter your audience groups later on.

Create a Targeted Audience

Once a data source has been uploaded to CXI, either through the API, an HRIS Connector, or via CSV file, it can be used as the active audience to send communications to your entire company. However, you may want to create a smaller targeted audience that targets a specific set of those employees. Do this by creating a new targeted audience using one or more filters.

1. Log in to your account and navigate to any Communicate Journey. All audience files uploaded to CXI are available to all  of the Communicate Journeys for that account.
2. Go to the Preferences section of that Communicate Journey.
3. Go to Audience Creation and Management.
4. Click Create New.
5. In the pop-up window, select Targeted Audience.
   
6. Select your employee data source. Your integrations and any uploaded CSV’s will appear as possible sources.
7. Select your source, confirm the column headers and click Add a Filter. You can add as many filters as you like and are only limited by the number of columns you have included in your data. Here, we have chosen to filter by Department and entered “Finances” as the filter term.
8. Click Save. Your targeted audience will be available to all your Communicate Journeys.

You can create an advanced “OR” search by using the vertical bar “|” character. In the previous example, the search term “New York | Chicago” would include the employees in both offices.

Active Audience

Make sure you have your active audience assigned before your Communicate Journey is scheduled to start.

Note

This chapter is only for One-Time Communicate Journeys. If you have a Recurring Campaign, please refer to the Recurring Campaign article for audience creation steps.

You can disable automated messaging at any time by setting your active audience to None. If None is selected, your messages, even if approved, will not send for that Communicate Journey.

Submit a ticket or talk to your Tivian team if you have further questions about active audiences.

Updating a CSV file

An integration will update automatically at the intervals you set up. But if you are using a CSV file as your employee data source, you will want to keep it up to date. When you update your CSV file, all targeted audiences based on that file will update automatically.

In the Preferences section, you can see the current active audience for this campaign. Below it is Audience Creation and Management. Click Update if you want to make changes to an existing audience.

The resulting prompts are similar to steps 6-9 in the “Employee data from a CSV file chapter.”

Sub-Audiences

Sub-audiences are further targeted employee filters intended for use in personalization. If you wish to vary your message for different groups within a Communicate Journey.

CXI allows you to easily create and manage sub-audiences from the Preferences section.

• Sub-audiences are an account-level setting that can be reused across your Communicate Journeys.
• Sub-audiences cannot be used as the main audience for a Communicate Journey.
• Sub-audiences cannot be deleted if they are assigned to a message in a Communicate Journey
• Sub-audiences act as filters and can be applied to any targeted audience.
• You can also create a sub-audience directly from the audience management window in the timeline.

Create a Sub-Audience

1. In the Preferences section, scroll down to Audience Creation and Management.
2. Select the audience from the drop-down menu.
3. Click Create Sub-Audience.
4. Name your sub-audience.
5. Click Add A Filter.
6. Modify your sub-audience with as many filters as you like. As you add filters, you will see a preview of your list below drawing from the selected audience.
7. Click Save.

Your sub-audiences will appear in a list below and are now available to you in the campaign area as you plan and compose your Communicate Journey.

Submit a ticket or talk to your Tivian team if you have further questions about sub-audiences.

Basic Audience

If you choose not to upload employee data to CXI, the platform will not be able to automatically send messages to your employees. You will use your own email system to forward CXI emails to your employees. A basic audience is like a placeholder for the system to remind you who and how many people you forwarded an email to.

Create a Basic Audience

When you have a basic audience configured, CXI will send messages to your inbox for you to forward to your audience.

1. Start in the Communicate Journey dashboard, and select a Communicate Journey to create a basic audience.
2. Go to the Preferences section and under Audience Creation and Management, click Create New.
3. A pop-up window will appear, select Basic Audience.
4. When you are naming the audience, make sure to reflect who you are forwarding the messages to. If possible, use the same name as the email list you are using in your email application.

FAQ

How can I import employee data into CXI?

There are two ways to import employee data: through a custom connection using CXI’s public API, which allows for automated data integration, or by directly uploading a CSV file containing employee data downloaded from your HRIS system.

What is the difference between a targeted audience and a basic audience?

A targeted audience contains contact information and is used to send messages directly to employees, allowing for automated sending and more advanced features. A basic audience only contains a number representing the employees and is used for reference in the Analytics section when messages are manually forwarded from the platform.

How secure is the information I upload?

Tivian takes privacy and security very seriously. Any data that you upload will be encrypted and at no point will any of your data be shared with a third party (except where absolutely necessary in order to actually send a text or email). In short, we only want you to use it in ways that are helpful to your employees. See our Privacy Policies and Terms of Use for additional information.

Is an Excel file the same as a CSV file?

Files must be in CSV format. Excel can save files as CSV and those can be uploaded.

Can I upload any information to an audience list?

Any information can be used to segment campaigns. However, Tivian strongly advises that sensitive information should not be used (such as salary or social security numbers).

If I have multiple audiences created off of a single file, what happens when I update that file?

Updating a file that is the source of multiple audiences will automatically update all related audiences, as long as the columns remain the same.

• employeelist_Blank.csv979 Bytes Download
• demo_employeelist.csv10 KB Download