Build an Audience with Chat

The Audience Builder is chat-based. You describe the donors you want in plain English, and Dataro turns that description into filter chips you can check and edit, with a live donor count that updates as they appear. The feature is labeled beta, and the manual filter path is available alongside it whenever you want to set a filter exactly. Nothing is stored until you save the audience.

The first step routes you to one of two outcomes, because the two behave differently once you save.

• Build produces a one-time audience for a specific piece of outreach, when what you need to know is which donors to contact for that piece of work.
• Track produces an ongoing audience with a goal attached, so you can watch movement against that goal over time.

If you are not sure which you need, we recommend Build, because most campaign work is a single send. Track is the better choice when you have a target you intend to measure against over several weeks rather than send to once.

We recommend describing the whole audience in one go rather than feeding it one condition at a time. "Monthly givers in Victoria who gave in the last two years but not in the last six months" gives chat more to work with than three separate messages, and produces a cleaner set of chips.

Every chip is a filter, and every chip is editable, so read them before you go further. Chat usually recognizes the general shape of a request but is less reliable on the specifics, which is why the chips are where you confirm what was applied. The live donor count updates as they appear and is the quickest way to spot a problem: a count of zero, or a count close to the size of your entire file, usually means a condition was misread.

Each filter combines with the others using either AND or OR. AND narrows the audience, so "gave in the last 12 months AND lives in New South Wales" returns only donors who satisfy both. OR widens it, so the same pair with OR returns everyone who satisfies either.

Chat infers which operator you meant from your phrasing, and we recommend checking it. Everyday English often uses "and" where a filter needs OR: "donors in Sydney and Melbourne" read as AND asks for donors who live in both cities at once, so no one matches. If a result is much smaller than you expected, check your operators first.

A result of 0 donors on its own does not tell you which filter emptied the audience, so a banner appears with two options:

• Remove the last filter. We recommend trying this first, because the filter you added most recently is usually the one that emptied the audience, and removing only that filter keeps the rest of your work.
• Reset. Clears the filters so you can start the description again. This is the better option when you have added enough conditions that removing them one at a time would take longer than starting over.

To find the filter that emptied your audience:

1. Remove the last filter and watch the count. If donors reappear, that filter is the one responsible.
2. Check the operators. AND between two conditions that cannot both be true, for example two different states, returns zero every time.
3. Check any date or numeric filter against what you asked for. Inverted values are a known issue, so "last 30 days" can be read as "next 30 days", which returns no donors.

A stray click in the sidebar does not discard an audience you are part-way through building. A confirmation appears when you navigate away with unsaved changes, offering three options:

• Save opens Save Audience so you can keep what you have built.
• Edit returns you to the builder with your filters intact. This is the option to choose if you did not intend to navigate away.
• Leave abandons the in-progress audience. The filters you assembled are not held for you, so we recommend saving first if there is any chance you will want them again.

To save an audience:

1. Click Save Audience.
2. Enter a name. Dataro checks it against your existing audiences and tells you if it is already taken, so you cannot overwrite a colleague's audience by reusing its name.
3. Add a description. The description is optional, and it is worth writing.
4. Confirm. The audience appears in the relevant tab on the Audiences page.

A name records what an audience was called. A description records what it was for and whether it is safe to reuse: six weeks after a campaign, "Winter appeal, mid-level, excludes anyone in the March test cell" is often what lets a colleague reuse an audience instead of rebuilding it.

Where the save lands depends on how you reached the builder. An audience you started in the Audience Builder yourself lands on the Saved tab. An audience you arrived at from an insight or a playbook lands on Dataro audiences instead, so if you saved one and cannot find it in Saved, check Dataro audiences before rebuilding it. The split exists so Dataro's own recommendations stay distinguishable from your own segmentation.

Chat is a shortcut rather than a replacement. Every filter chat can produce, you can also add, edit, or delete yourself. We recommend that if chat returns the wrong filters twice, you stop rephrasing and edit the chips instead, because editing a chip is usually faster than rewording a prompt. Chat is currently the only way into the Audience Builder, and a dedicated non-chat entry point, for working directly in a filter builder, is on the near-term roadmap.

Chat missed part of what I asked for. What should I do?

Edit the chips directly. That is faster and more certain than rephrasing. If you would rather try again in chat, name the field you care about and the exact window, for example "last gift between 6 and 24 months ago" instead of "lapsed".

Does removing the last filter undo my whole audience?

No. It removes only the most recent filter and leaves the rest of your chips in place. Reset is the option that clears the filters, so use that only when you want to start the description again.

I clicked away and lost my audience. Can I get it back?

Not once you have confirmed Leave, which is why the confirmation exists. If the confirmation appears and you are not certain, choose Edit to return to the builder, or Save to keep the work under any name.

Why will it not let me use the name I want?

Because an audience with that name already exists. The duplicate-name check is there so you cannot replace an audience a colleague relies on without knowing. Add a qualifier such as a date or campaign code and save again.