Broadcast Audiences
An audience is a saved, reusable set of recipients. Build the filter once, name it, and any broadcast can reach it without you rebuilding the same rules.
Audiences live at Broadcasts → Audiences. You can also build a filter directly on a broadcast and save it as an audience from there.
How an audience resolves
Audiences are filters, not fixed lists. They're resolved fresh every time — when you preview a broadcast, and again when it actually sends.
That matters in both directions:
A customer that becomes Enterprise tomorrow is inside "Tier is Enterprise" tomorrow, with no editing.
A broadcast scheduled for next week sends to whoever matches next week, not to whoever matched when you scheduled it.
The chain is: filter → matching customers → their connected Slack channels.
A channel only becomes a recipient if it's a customer channel and it's enabled. Discussion channels and disabled channels are silently skipped, even if you pinned them by name. The count you see in the preview is always the real, post-filtering number.
A customer with no connected Slack channel cannot be reached by a broadcast, no matter how well they match the filter. If your count is lower than expected, this is usually why.
Filter dimensions
Click Add filter to pick a dimension. Each opens a searchable list of values.
Dimension | What it matches |
|---|---|
Audience | Another saved audience. Only available on a broadcast, not inside another audience. |
Channel | Specific Slack channels, pinned by identity. Doesn't change when a channel is renamed. |
Channel name | Channels whose name contains the text you type, matched case-insensitively at send time. Picks up channels created or renamed after you saved the filter. |
Tenant | Specific tenants by name. |
Tier | Every tenant on the chosen tier or tiers. |
Tenant field | Any visible tenant field — for example a region, plan, or owner field. |
Tenant fields with no fixed set of values (a free-text or date field, for example) don't appear in the menu, because there's nothing to pick from.
How filters combine
Two simple rules cover almost everything:
Different dimensions narrow. "Tier is Enterprise" plus "Tenant field: Region is EU" reaches only Enterprise customers in the EU.
Values inside one dimension widen. "Tier is Enterprise, Growth" reaches both tiers.
Is / is not
Each filter pill can be flipped from is to is not. "Tier is not Free" reaches everyone except Free tier.
AND / OR
Filter pills sit in groups. You can set the operator between pills in a group, and between groups, to AND or OR.
An is not filter joined by OR reaches almost everyone. "Tier is Enterprise OR tier is not Free" is not a narrower audience than either half — the two sides add together. Plain shows a warning when you build one. Check the channel count below the filter before you send.
Nesting limits
The builder supports groups of pills, one level deep. An is not can only negate a single pill — not a whole group, and not another negation. If you need something deeper, split it into two audiences and combine them with the Audience dimension.
Creating an audience
Go to Broadcasts → Audiences and click New Audience.
Give it a name. Name it for who it reaches — "Enterprise — NA", "Design partners".
Add filters. The channel list at the bottom fills in as you build, showing exactly who this resolves to right now.
Click Save Audience.
An audience with no filters at all reaches every customer. That's valid, and sometimes what you want, but it's worth naming it clearly.
Saving a filter from a broadcast
While building Deliver to on a broadcast, click Save as Audience. Name it and save.
The filter you built collapses into a single audience pill on that broadcast. The rules haven't changed — they now live in the audience instead of on the broadcast.
Using an audience in a broadcast
In the broadcast's Deliver to section, click Add filter → Audiences and pick one.
An audience behaves like any other dimension, so you can combine it:
"Design partners" AND "Tier is Enterprise" — only design partners who are also Enterprise.
"Design partners" OR "Beta users" — everyone in either.
"All customers" AND NOT "Internal channels" — everyone except the ones in that audience.
An audience can't be defined in terms of another audience. Nesting stops at one level, so you can always see what a filter actually resolves to.
Excluding individual channels
Filters describe a rule. Sometimes you want the rule minus three specific channels.
In a broadcast's Deliver to section, uncheck any channel in the resolved list. An excluding N pill appears next to your filters, and the count above the list drops.
Two things to know:
Exclusions belong to the broadcast, not to the audience. Excluding a channel here never changes who the audience reaches elsewhere.
Unchecked channels stay visible in the list, so you can check them again.
Clear the excluding N pill to restore every channel at once.
The audiences list
Each row shows:
- Name
- Created by
- Filter — the rules in plain words
- Targets — how many channels it resolves to right now
- Last edited
Click a row to edit it.
Editing and deleting
Editing
Editing an audience changes who every broadcast using it reaches — including broadcasts already scheduled but not yet sent. Broadcasts that have already sent are unaffected; their recipient list is a record of what happened.
Deleting
Deleting an audience removes it from the picker so no new broadcast can use it. Broadcasts already sent to it keep their history.
You can't delete an audience while a broadcast targeting it is scheduled or currently sending. Cancel or wait for that broadcast first.
Troubleshooting
"No Tenants match this filter. Widen it to reach someone."
The filter is too narrow, or a value has changed. Nobody matches at all.
"Tenants match, but none of them has a connected Slack channel that is enabled."
The right customers matched, but Plain has no channel to post in. Check the Slack integration and whether those channels are enabled customer channels.
"Everything this filter matched was removed by the exclusions on this Broadcast."
You've unchecked every channel the filter found. Clear the excluding N pill.
"This audience was written through the API and says more than this editor can show."
The filter uses a shape the visual builder can't draw — usually a filter created through the API. The builder goes read-only rather than quietly dropping part of it. Edit it through the API, or rebuild it as a new audience.
The count is lower than the number of matching customers.
Expected. Customers without an enabled, connected customer channel aren't reachable, and one customer can have zero, one, or several channels.