Managing Smart Groups

Smart Groups are based on a set of rules and they update themselves automatically when a new contact passes the criteria set for each Smart Group. These work well especially with custom fields.

For example, you can create a Smart Group for contacts which have Nairobi as their hometown. Every time the custom field called hometown is added to a contact and 'Nairobi' is entered into the field, the contact will automatically be added to that particular smart group.

Creating a Smart Group

On the People tab, click on the plus (+) sign next to the Smart Groups heading. 

1. Enter a Name for the Smart Group in the top box(1). Once you have chosen a name, you can Define some rules for the Smart Group.
2. When adding a rule, first choose the contact field it should apply to. For the example above, the first rule is defined to automatically add to the Smart Group all Contacts whose phone number starts with +254. This rule operates by checking the "mobile" field of the contact(2)
3. After choosing the field, you can define the operation to apply to the field. This determines what kind of check is performed on the field you picked in step 2. For example, to create a Smart Group for all contacts who share the name Robert (though they may have different surnames), we'd set it up to check whether the name field contains "Robert". The screenshot above shows the "starts with" option selected(3), as part of our setup for the example above.
4. Finally you can define the value to compare the contact field against. In the screenshot, we've set the value to "+254".
5. You can add more rules as you would like by selecting more contact fields(2)  to set  rules for. For example above you can pick either Contact name and add a rule to automatically add to the Smart Group all Contacts whose names start with 'A'.
6. Click Save once you have set the rules. The Smart Group will be saved under the Smart Group heading and all the Contacts who already fulfill the rules you have set will be moved to the Smart Group.

Note: When importing contacts, you cannot predefine smart groups in the file that you are importing. You need to create the smart groups on your workspace and if any of your imported contacts match the smart group's criteria, they will be automatically added to the smart group.