Member groups and mailing lists

Every club keeps lists: the Tuesday roll-up crowd, the people who have not paid yet, the over-70s, the ones who actually want the newsletter. Kept in a spreadsheet or somebody’s address book, a list is out of date the week after it is written, and sooner or later somebody is left off an email that mattered.

A group in Pavilion is not a list. It is a description — a set of rules over the member record — and it is worked out fresh every single time it is used. “Full members who have not paid” means exactly that today, not who it meant when somebody last tidied the list. Nobody maintains it, and nobody is left off.

🎯 Making one

Members → Member Groups → New group. Give it a name, then add rules. Each rule is a field, a comparison and a value: membership type is full, subscription paid is no, age is at least 70, date joined was in the last 90 days. Choose whether a member needs to match every rule or any of them.

The count updates as you type, and names a few of the people it catches. That number is the point of the screen — it is the only thing that tells you whether you have described what you actually meant. If it says 140 when you expected 12, the rules are wrong and you can see it straight away instead of after you press send.

📅 Rules that move with the calendar

Date and age rules are worked out relative to today, not fixed when you save. “Renewal due within the next 30 days” is a rolling window, so the same group is right in March and right again in September. “Years a member is at least 25” quietly picks up each new long-standing member as they reach it — useful for the ones who should be recognised at the AGM.

✉️ Using one as a mailing list

Tick use this as a mailing list and the group appears as an audience when you write an email or a newsletter, alongside the built-in ones. Choose it and the email goes to whoever is in the group at that moment.

Those emails carry their own unsubscribe link, and this is the part that matters: a member who unsubscribes from a group is taken out of it whatever the rules say. A rule can never override somebody’s own choice. They still get anything the club has to send them as a member — their renewal notice, a subscription reminder — because that is club business rather than a mailing list.

Things it deliberately does not do

• Archived members are never included. They have left; a group is for talking to people who are here.
• A group with no usable rules catches nobody, not everybody. A group that quietly widens is how the whole club ends up on a mailing meant for six people.
• Nobody is added by hand. If you want a fixed list of named people, that is what the member list and its filters are for — a group is a rule, and staying a rule is what keeps it honest.

Common questions

Can I add one particular member to a group?

Not directly, and that is on purpose — the moment a group is part rule and part hand-picked list, nobody can tell which. If you need one person in, find a rule that describes them (their committee role, their membership type) or use the member list with filters to pick people for a one-off email.

Somebody unsubscribed but they still match the rules. Will they come back?

No. An unsubscribe is remembered against that member and that group, and it beats the rules every time. They only come back if the club puts them back.

Will they stop getting their renewal reminder too?

No. Unsubscribing takes them off that mailing list only. Renewal notices, subscription reminders and anything else the club has to send a member are unaffected — they are not a mailing list.

What happens to a group if I stop using a membership type?

Any rule about a field that no longer exists is dropped rather than guessed at, and the group is worked out from its remaining rules. Open the group and check the count if you have made a change like that.

How is this different from the audiences already in the email screen?

The built-in audiences cover the handful of things every club needs — all active members, unpaid, renewal due. Groups are for everything specific to your club that we could not have guessed at, and there is no limit to how many you have.

Does the count include people with no email address?

The count is everybody in the group. If some of them have no email address the screen tells you how many, and a mailing simply skips them — there is nowhere to send.