Contact Person Collections

Using contact person collections, you can compile and maintain defined lists of persons, either manually or automatically. Both types of collections are well suited, for example, for creating recipient lists for mailings, or participants lists for events.

To manual collections, persons are added explicitly, or persons are removed explicitly from them, either by an OMC user or – with manual collections that serve as subscriber lists – by the contact person herself.

The persons in automatic collections, on the other hand, are determined by the OMC based on criteria you can define freely. As opposed to static manual collections, automatic collections are dynamic. The OMC updates them in regular intervals to make the collections represent only the subset of the contact person base that matches the respective collection’s criteria.

Finding and Viewing Collections

Clicking the Collections button on the contact persons main page will display all the collections you have access to. This includes your personal (i.e. private) collections as well as those that were made available to at least one of your roles.

If required, use the search form on the page to restrict the results list. The form offers the following fields:

• Title / Name: Restricts the search to those collections whose title or name contains the character string entered.

• Limit by Role: Searches only for collections made available to the members of the role specified here.

• Include Only My Collections: Only your personal collections will be considered.

• Include Only Subscription Lists: Searches only for named collections.

Click Search in Collections to search for collections that match the criteria you specified.

Click an item in the results list to edit or delete the collection concerned, or to view or edit the persons assigned to it. The procedures are the same as for account collections.

Creating a New Manual Contact Person Collection

Click the New manual list button on the page on which the contact person collections are listed. First, a form for specifying the properties of the contact person list is displayed:

The form fields have the following meaning:

• Title: The collection will be stored under the title specified here.

• Subscription Name: The collection needs to have a name if you want the persons to be able to subscribe to or unsubscribe from the list via your website. By means of this name, the web application is able to perform the action the person desires.

• Visible by Role: Do not specify anything here if you are creating the collection for yourself. Or select one of the available roles from the list. The list only contains roles you have.

• Entries Changeable by Role: If required, specify the role an OMC user needs to have for being able to add persons to or remove persons from the collection.

Click Create to create the collection. As a confirmation, the details page of the collection is displayed:

The same page is also displayed after clicking an entry in the collections overview or in the search results list. The buttons on this details page have the following functions:

• Edit: Opens the form for editing the properties of the collection (such as its title).

• Delete: Deletes the collection after confirmation.

• Edit Entries: Displays a form for adding individual contact persons or persons from other collections to this collection, or for removing persons from the collection.

• Delete Entries: Opens a page for selecting individual contacts for deletion.

• Data Export (CSV): Enables you to save the persons in the collection to a CSV file (comma-separated values, a table in text format). The fields to be included can be selected.

• Search in Entries: Searches for contact persons in the collection whose name contains the specified characters, and displays the results list.

You can now use the collection as a recipient list for mailings, as an invitation list for events, or for other purposes.

Editing the Entries of a Manual Collection

In the details view of a manual collection, click Edit Entries. The following form will be displayed:

The form elements have the following functions:

• Contact List: You can select an existing contact person collection from the drop-down menu to add the persons contained in it to the collection being edited.

• Event / Event Contact State: Use these two form fields to add the participants of an event to your collection. First, select the event by typing a couple characters contained in its title and then select the desired entry from the results list showing up. Afterwards, you can optionally add only those persons that have a particular participation state (e.g. Unregistered). You can choose the desired state from the drop-down menu.

• Mailing / Mailing Contact State: Using these two input fields, you can add persons to your list who are part of the recipient list of a mailing. Optionally, you can add only those persons who have a particular mailing state (e.g. Clicked on a link).

• Single Contact: Enter a couple of characters part of the desired contact person’s name into the input field and select the desired entry from the results list showing up.

• Upload CSV file: If you have a CSV file whose first column contains the IDs of contact persons from the OMC, you can upload this file here to add the persons to your collection.

You can fill-in as many of the input fields described above as you need to add persons to your collection. The OMC will automatically remove duplicates from it.

Finally, click Add Contacts. Afterwards, the same page will be displayed, plus status information about the actions taken. Furthermore, since the collection now has entries, further operations are available:

In addition to Add Contacts, the following is now possible.

• Intersect Contacts: This will remove those persons from the collection being edited who are not part of the persons specified by means of the form fields. This is conveniert if you wish to reduce a collection to those persons who are also part of a different collection.

• Remove Contacts: This removes those persons from the collection who are determined by what has been entered into the form fields. This operations corresponds to “subtracting” persons from the collection being edited.

• Remove All Contacts: This empties the collection. The contents of the form fields is ignored.

• Cancel: This brings you back to the details page of the collection.

Creating an Automatic Contact Person Collection

On the overview page on which the contact person collections are displayed, click the New Automatic Collection button. A large form with four sections will be displayed.

In the topmost section the name of the collection and its visibility can be specified. The second section serves to specify the account criteria, if required. (Some input fields have been removed from the screenshots to save space.)

If you specify account criteria, the OMC will retrieve all the persons of the accounts that match the given criteria – provided that these persons also satisfy all the other citeria.

By means of the third and the fourth section of the form, the search criteria related to the persons and their locations, respectively, can be specified.

The OMC will only add persons to the collection who satisfy all of the criteria selected from the lower three sections (i.e. the criteria are combined using and). If you wish to create a collection from criteria sets not compatible with each other, you might create several collections first and then join them into the target collection.

Finally, click Create. You can modify the name of the collections as well as its criteria later on by editing the collection.

Please note that the persons included in automatic collections are calculated by jobs. Since jobs are executed at specific points in time, such collections may have too many or too few entries between two calculations.