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What are Pathways and Audiences?

Updated

A Pathway sends an Avid audience to another platform and keeps it up to date. An audience is a saved list of people who match rules you set. Use this article to see how audiences, Pathways, and connections fit together.

Use this article when

  • You are new to Pathways and want the big picture before you set one up.
  • You want to know how an audience differs from a Pathway.
  • Your left nav says Audiences instead of Pathways, and you want to know why.

What Pathways does

A Pathway connects one Avid audience to one destination, such as an email tool or an ad platform. You choose who belongs in the audience once. Avid sends the list to the destination and keeps it current.

Common uses:

  • Send donor or subscriber segments to email or marketing automation tools.
  • Send first-party lists to ad platforms such as Meta (Facebook) and Google Ads for targeting and lookalikes.
  • Send conversion events to Meta through the Conversions API.

LockStep insight: A Pathway is an ongoing sync, not a one-time export. After the first push, Avid re-runs it when the audience's data refreshes, usually daily. File Export is the exception. It builds a new file each time you export.

What an audience is

An audience is a saved subset of your constituent data (your main donor data). You set rules, called filters, using fields from your CRM, email system, and other connected sources. Avid lists the people who match.

You can start an audience in three ways:

To narrow an audience, see Applying Filters.

Four audience options

An owned audience is one you build from your own data and filters. Each audience row has a three-dot Actions menu. It lets you create a Lookalike, a Propensity model, an Analysis audience, or a Persona. A Lookalike is a modeled audience, which Avid creates from an owned one.

See Choose a Pathways audience option: Lookalike, Propensity, Analysis, or Persona for what each option needs. See Owned vs. modeled audiences in Avid for the difference.

Where to find audiences and Pathways

The left nav label depends on your plan. With full Pathways, it reads Pathways. Full Pathways lets you send audiences to connected platforms. Without it, the label reads Audiences. You can still build and export audiences.

With full Pathways, the page has three tabs:

Tab What you do there
Add a new Pathway Select an audience, choose a destination, and review settings before you confirm.
Manage Pathways See active destinations, the audiences connected to each, and sync status.
Manage Audiences Create, duplicate, and export audiences.

How it works

  1. Connect your destination under Settings > Connections. Connections that support Pathways show a Pathways badge. See What integrations work with Pathways?
  2. Create or choose an audience on the Manage Audiences tab.
  3. On Add a new Pathway, pick the audience and the destination. Click Review Pathway, then click Confirm on Pathway Summary. For the full steps, see Set up a Pathway.
  4. Avid re-runs the Pathway when the audience's data refreshes, usually daily. To check recent runs, see Check Pathway health on Manage Pathways.

Key terms

Term Meaning
Destination The platform that receives the audience, or File Export.
File Export A built-in destination that makes a CSV file you download. It runs once each time you confirm. See Export an audience and download it as a CSV file.
Column mapping How Avid fields match the destination's fields. You review it on Pathway Summary.
Constituent data blend Donor-level data that Avid builds from your connected systems. See Constituent Data Blend Glossary.

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