Creating a Segment

What a Segment Is

Every member record in Engage carries tags — short labels such as past-due, loc-canada, regular-member, or role-teacher. Tags are drawn from your iMIS data and describe membership status, location, tenure, interests, event history, and more.

A segment is a saved rule about those tags — for example “members who are past due, in the US or Canada, and not non-members.” Because Engage saves the rule rather than a fixed list of names, you can return to a segment later and it will reflect your current membership data.

Why this matters

Build the segment once and reuse it — target a campaign, or export a list for a mailing — without rebuilding the same filter each time.

Opening the Segment Builder

Everything starts from Segments → All Members.

1. Go to Datascout Engage and log in with the credentials provided by the Datascout team.
2. In the left sidebar, click Segments to expand it.
3. Click All Members. This opens the Segment Builder with your full member list loaded and no filters applied.

The Segments menu. All Members is the builder itself. Below it, Custom Segments lists your saved segments, grouped into folders.

The Segment Builder, unfiltered. The count banner shows every contact in your account. Note that Save Segment is greyed out — it stays disabled until you apply at least one tag.

The builder has four parts, top to bottom:

Area	What it does
Toolbar	Save Segment, Export and Clear, top right.
Ask box	Describe the members you want in plain English.
Filter boxes	The three tag rules — Must Have, Could Have, Must Not Have.
Results	A live contact count, then the matching members in a grid.

Who can do this

Saved segments are shared across everyone in your organization: a segment you create is visible to your colleagues, and one they delete disappears for you too.

Who can change one depends on your role. Editors and Chapter users can modify only the segments they created themselves; Managers and Administrators can modify any of them. Everyone can build and save new ones.

The Three Filters

Master these and you can build any segment.

• Must Have (AND) — the member must carry every tag in this box.
• Could Have (OR) — the member must carry at least one tag in this box.
• Must Not Have (NOT) — the member must carry none of the tags in this box.

The three boxes are then combined with AND: a member is included only if they satisfy the Must Have rule and the Could Have rule and the Must Not Have rule. Any box you leave empty is simply ignored.

Each box states its own logic. The grey line under each heading is a permanent reminder of how that box behaves.

A Worked Example

Say you want past-due members located in the United States or Canada, excluding non-members. That maps onto the three boxes like this:

Past due · US or Canada · members only

Box	Tags
Must Have	past-due
Could Have	loc-united-states, loc-canada
Must Not Have	non-member

In this example account, that narrows 5,468 contacts → 2,213 with past-due alone → 1,508 once the location and exclusion rules are applied.

Read it as a sentence: must be past due, and must be in the US or Canada, and must not be a non-member. Putting the two location tags in Could Have is what makes them an “either/or” — placing them in Must Have instead would demand members be tagged with both countries at once, which almost nobody is.

Rule of thumb

If you catch yourself saying “and” between two conditions, use Must Have. If you say “or”, use Could Have. If you say “but not”, use Must Not Have.

Color tells you which rule a tag belongs to — blue for Must Have, green for Could Have, red for Must Not Have. Each chip shows that tag's own member count, and an × to remove it.

Building a Segment

Three ways to fill the boxes. They produce identical results, and you can mix them freely.

Method 1 — Ask in Plain English

The quickest route. Describe the members you want in the Tell Datascout which members you want to see box at the top of the builder, then click the orange arrow or press Enter. Datascout reads your sentence and fills the three filter boxes for you.

Describe the group in your own words. There is no special syntax — write it as you would say it.

After a moment, the tags appear in the boxes, sorted into the right rule:

The same request, translated. "Teachers in Canada who have donated" became three Must Have tags, and "but are not past due" became a Must Not Have tag.

Datascout maps ordinary words onto the three rules the way you would expect:

When you write…	It goes to	Example
“and”, or simply listing traits	Must Have	“teachers in Canada who have donated”
“or”, “either”, “any of”	Could Have	“in the United States or Canada”
“not”, “excluding”, “but not”	Must Not Have	“but are not past due”

Always check the result

Treat the answer as a well-informed first draft, not the final word. Glance at the three boxes and the contact count before you save — this is exactly what the three filters prepared you for. If a tag landed in the wrong box, drag it across; if one is missing, add it by hand. Everything below works on the result.

Method 2 — Pick Tags from the List

1. Click Add Must Have tag… (or Add Could Have tag… / Add Must Not Have tag…) on the box you want to fill.
2. The tag list opens, sorted by size — the most-used tags first, each with its member count.
3. Type into Search tags… to narrow the list. The counter updates to show how many tags match.
4. Click a tag to apply it. The list stays open so you can add several in a row; click elsewhere or press Esc to close it.

The tag picker. The header tells you how many tags exist in total, and each row shows how many members carry that tag.

Searching narrows the list and the counter changes from the total to the number of matches.

Tip

The member count next to each tag is a useful sanity check before you apply it. A tag showing a handful of members will produce a tiny segment; one covering most of your database will barely narrow anything.

Method 3 — Drag a Tag from the Results

Every tag chip in the Tags column of the member grid can be dragged straight into a filter box. This is the quickest way to build a segment when you have spotted a useful tag on a member you are already looking at.

1. Find a tag you want in the Tags column of the results grid.
2. Drag it onto any of the three filter boxes and release.
3. To move a tag between boxes afterwards, drag its chip from one box to another — for example from Must Have to Could Have to loosen the rule.

The Tags column. Each chip here is draggable — drop it on a filter box to add it to your segment.

Mix and match

All three methods edit the same three boxes, so they combine freely. A common workflow is to describe the group in plain English to get most of the way there, then drag one tag across and search for another to finish the job.

Reading Your Results

The count updates the moment a filter changes — use it to check your logic before saving.

The same builder with filters applied. The count has dropped and Save Segment is now active.

The grid beneath the count lists every matching member with these columns:

Column	Contains
Name	Member name and their iMIS ID
Email	Primary email address, or - if none is on file
Company	Employer or organization
City / Country	Location as recorded in iMIS
Language	Preferred correspondence language
Member Type	The member-type code from your iMIS configuration
Tags	Every tag on that member — draggable into the filter boxes

Each column header carries a filter icon and a menu for adjusting how the grid is displayed. There is also a Drag here to set row groups bar above the grid for grouping results — by Country or Member Type, for instance.

Sanity check

If the count looks wrong, the usual cause is a tag in the wrong box. A count far lower than expected often means two tags that rarely occur together both ended up in Must Have — move them to Could Have.

Saving a Segment

Give it a name, an icon and a home in the sidebar.

1. With at least one tag applied, click Save Segment in the top-right corner.
2. Optionally click the emoji tile to pick an icon — it appears beside the segment name everywhere in Engage.
3. Enter a Name. This is required; Create Segment stays disabled until you type one.
4. Optionally add a Description explaining what the segment is for.
5. Choose a Destination Folder. Leave it as Root to place the segment at the top level of the sidebar.
6. Click Create Segment. Engage saves it and opens the new segment’s own page.

The Save Segment dialog. Name is the only required field; Create Segment is greyed out until it is filled.

Destination Folder lists Root plus every existing folder, alphabetically.

A completed dialog. Descriptions are worth writing — they are the only place to record why a segment exists.

Naming that survives contact with colleagues

Describe the membership, not the campaign: “Past Due — US & Canada” stays accurate next year, whereas “October mailing” will not. Put the campaign detail in the description. Remember that colleagues will see these names too.

Managing a Saved Segment

Open any segment from the sidebar to rename, edit, duplicate, export or delete it.

A saved segment. Same builder, with the filters collapsed and a toolbar of segment actions added.

The segment toolbar. Save stays greyed out until you make a change.

Rename It

Click the segment title. It becomes an editable field in place — type the new name and click outside the field to save. Press Esc to cancel without changing anything.

Renaming happens in place — there is no separate dialog.

Read or Edit the Description

Click the small Description toggle under the title to expand it.

The description, expanded. Collapsed by default to keep the header compact.

Change the Filters

1. Click Filters to expand the filter panel.
2. Add or remove tags exactly as you did when building — the three boxes behave identically here.
3. Click Save in the toolbar to keep the change. It becomes active as soon as something differs from the saved version.

Editing a saved segment uses the same three boxes, pre-loaded with the segment's current tags.

Don’t lose your edits

Changing a filter updates the count immediately, but the change is not stored until you click Save. Navigating away first discards it.

Duplicate It

Click Duplicate to open the Save Segment dialog again with the same filters. The name field starts empty, so give the copy its own name before clicking Create Segment. This is the safest way to try a variation without touching the original.

Duplicating reopens the save dialog. The folder carries over; the name does not.

Export It

Click Export to download the segment as an Excel workbook. The file is named ds-<Segment-Name>-<YYYY-MM-DD>.xlsx. Export is also available from the unsaved builder, so you can pull a one-off list without saving a segment first.

Delete It

Click Delete, then confirm in the dialog. Engage returns you to All Members and the segment disappears from the sidebar.

Deletion is permanent. There is no undo and no archive — duplicate first if you are unsure.

Before you delete

Deleting removes the segment for every colleague, not just for you, so check first whether it is being used as the target segment of a campaign — deleting removes the rule, not the members, but anything pointing at that segment will lose its audience.

Folders and Organization

Saved segments live under Custom Segments in the sidebar, grouped into folders.

Each entry shows its emoji, its name, and its current member count, so you can see at a glance how large a group is without opening it. Choose a folder when you save a segment, or leave it at Root to keep it at the top level.

A folder expanded. Click a folder to show the segments inside it; each one carries its own emoji, name and live member count.

Folders are ordinary groupings — by membership status, location, event attendance, and so on. Folder management is split across two menus. The ··· beside the Custom Segments heading creates a new top-level folder, and nothing else. Each folder carries its own ···, revealed by hovering over the folder row, offering New Sub-folder and Delete Folder.

Folders nest up to three levels — Events › 2026 › Gala — and the list shows a segment’s full path, so you can see where something sits without opening every folder above it. A long name is shortened on screen and shown in full when you hover it.

Deleting a folder does not delete what is in it. Its segments and any sub-folders move up one level.

There is no rename

Neither menu offers one, so it is worth getting a folder’s name right when you create it.

Keep a Drafts folder

Segments built while exploring an idea clutter the sidebar quickly — and because segments are shared, they clutter everyone’s. Saving experiments into a dedicated Drafts folder keeps the working segments easy to find and makes periodic clean-up obvious.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause & fix
A plain-English request produced the wrong tags	Datascout gives you a starting point, not a final answer. Move any misplaced tag to the correct box by dragging it, remove what you don’t need, and add anything missing. Short, direct wording (“past due members in Ontario”) usually reads better than a long sentence.
A plain-English request found no tags	The traits you described may not exist as tags in your data. Open a filter box and browse the tag list to see what is actually available, then build the segment from those.
Save Segment is greyed out	No tags are applied yet. Add at least one tag to any of the three boxes and the button becomes active.
Create Segment is greyed out	The Name field is empty. A name is required.
Zero or very few results	Usually two tags that rarely occur together are both in Must Have, which demands both. Move them to Could Have to mean “either”.
Far more results than expected	A broad tag is doing little work, or a rule you meant to exclude is in the wrong box. Check the per-tag counts against the total.
Filter edits keep disappearing	Changes to a saved segment are not stored until you click Save in the toolbar.
A segment vanished	Segments are shared organization-wide, so a colleague with the access to do so may have deleted or renamed it. Deletion cannot be undone.
A tag you expect is missing	Tags are drawn from your iMIS data. If it is not in the picker it has not been synced — contact Datascout rather than working around it.
Stale counts or an unresponsive grid	Reload the page. If it persists, clear your browser cache and cookies.

Quick Reference

Filter Logic

Box	Operator	Include the member when…
Must Have	AND	they carry every tag listed
Could Have	OR	they carry at least one tag listed
Must Not Have	NOT	they carry none of the tags listed

Actions

To do this	Go here
Open the builder	Segments → All Members
Build it by describing it	Type a plain-English request in the ask box → Enter
Add a tag	Add … tag… on any filter box, then search and click
Add a tag by dragging	Drag a chip from the grid’s Tags column onto a box
Move a tag between rules	Drag its chip from one box to another
Remove a tag	Click the × on the chip
Start over	Clear in the toolbar
Save a new segment	Save Segment → name it → Create Segment
Rename a segment	Click its title, edit in place, click away (Esc cancels)
Edit filters	Filters → change tags → Save
Copy a segment	Duplicate → give it a new name
Download to Excel	Export
Delete a segment	Delete → confirm

Note

Screenshots use sample data; the members, tags and folders shown are illustrative and will differ from your own account.

Questions about segments or your tag set? Contact support@datascout.ai.