Mailing groups in CiviPlus are used to organise contacts into specific lists for targeted email communications - bulk emails, newsletters, announcements, and other types of communications. They are essential for segmenting your audience and ensuring that your messages reach the right people.

They help you manage your outreach efforts more efficiently by categorising contacts based on certain criteria, for example shared characteristics or interests. You can create any number of groups and your contacts can belong to multiple ones at the same time. Groups can also serve as mailing lists making it very easy to send Newsletters to all the contacts who sign up to them.

To create or edit groups for mailing, you’ll find them under the Contacts tab from the main menu. Here you’ll find the option to either create a new group or to manage your existing groups.

Before creating your first group, it’s worth first noting that within CiviPlus you can create two types of groups. What will here be referred to as static groups and ‘smart’ groups. The differences are as follows:

Static groups - these are lists that you will create manually and will only be updated if you do so manually.

Smart groups - these are lists that you create based on a set of criteria which will then dynamically update whenever contacts meet or stop meeting these conditions.

When you click on the new group menu button, you’ll be greeted with a screen which lets you create the group. The top two fields are for you an internal name (required) and description. The ‘Public Group Title’ and ‘Description’ will be what external users see if you send them the option to sign up to this group on a form. This is important if you wish to use a different name internally to keep track of the list versus how you want your supporters to see it.

Perhaps the most important field here for mailing is under ‘group type’. The ‘Mailing List’ box must be ticked or you will be unable to use your group as a mailing list - though fortunately you can amend this later. The ‘Access Control’ option assigns CRM permissions to the group, so unless you are the CiviPlus admin, you will be very unlikely to want to tick this box on any mailing list you are creating.

Finally, you can choose if you want to use parent groups - this lets you nest your groups inside one another (e.g. a parent group for ‘Volunteers’ with segmented mailing lists by geography underneath that). Click save and your group is created!

When you create your new group, you’ll be presented with the above screen where you can search for group members by their name/email, the type of contact (individual/organisation/committee), if they’re in another group, or if they have a certain tag.

This might not meet your filtering requirements however, at which point you should use CiviPlus’s search functionality. Advanced Search often being a good place to start for these purposes.

Once you’ve picked your criteria and run your search you can check which contacts you want on your list and then click on the Actions button -> Group - add contacts to go to an interface where you can add contacts to your group.

You can add them to list you’ve created or you can even create a new group within this interface itself (though remember to find the group in the manage groups area and enable the mailing list checkbox!).

Smart groups are created slightly differently - if you’ve been following along with this guide in your own CiviPlus you might have already seen how! Under the actions button in the list you filtered using advanced search you should see Group - create smart group.

You will be then taken to an interface where you can create your smart group, including the name and title, and any parent group you wish it to sit in. As usual ensure you check the mailing list box or this group will not appear for use in your mailing module.