Attributes are pieces of information about your users that can be used to define membership in audiences. Audiences are the cornerstone of targeting the right information to the right people, as outlined in the article about how to use audiences.

There is some information that we know about your users simply because they are part of the community. For example, are they registered? Do they access the community through Android, iOS, or web?

To take personalization to the next level, if you have an SSO or SFTP deployment you can provide additional information about your users in the form of audience attributes:

• CSV via SFTP - Specify certain attributes as audience attributes when configuring your SFTP deployment.
• SSO SAML - All attributes passed via a SAML claim attribute statement will be processed as audience attributes, including first name, last name, and email.

Once you send audience attributes to Firstup, we can generate audiences for you automatically or you can create audiences yourself. More details below.

Audience Attribute Handling

All audience attributes will be available as custom attribute criteria when creating custom audiences (including country, department, title, and email), whether creating a basic custom audience or an advanced custom audience.

Audience Attribute Recommendations

Not all attributes are useful for creating audiences. Before sending an audience attribute, ask:

• Will there be at least two audiences for this attribute?
• Will there be more than one person in each audience?
• Does our content strategy include targeting these audiences?

Examples

These attributes are so common that we can easily map them to filters in Insights and use them for audiences. However, you should still ask if this information will result in useful information for your community and your strategy.

• Work Location
• Department
• Company
• Job Title
• Gender
• City
• State
• Country
• Region
• Language

The following attributes can be helpful for audience creation depending on your organization and content strategy. 

• Manager (Yes/No)
• Start Date - by Month/Year
• Birthdate - by Month
• Employee Type (Contractor, Full-Time vs Part-Time, Union)
• Union/Non-Union

We recommend against sending the following because this data is too specific to create useful audiences. For example, there is no useful way to audience users by phone number - each phone number would have an audience with a count of one user. Very few people would be in an audience for "birthdate 1/1/1990". We recommend passing any dates as just a month or month/year.

• Display Name
• Phone Number
• Home Address