Two ways to hold what you know about people, and they answer different questions.
A tag is a label: someone either carries it or they do not. A field holds a value: a date, a number, a choice, a piece of text.
"Attended the live event" is a tag. "Date of birth" is a field.
Tags
Create tags in settings, give each one a name, an icon and a colour, and a description so your team knows what it means.
Then apply them from a member's profile, from the list in bulk, or during an import.
Tags do not grant anything. They are for finding, filtering and segmenting: who came from which campaign, who attended, who you should call. If a label needs to unlock content, it should be a group instead.
Tags multiply quietly. Ten tags with clear names beat sixty where three mean almost the same thing. Write the description when you create the tag, not later.
Fields
Fields hold actual data, and they come in two kinds.
- Member fields live on member profiles. This is where date of birth, customer number, company, or whatever your business actually needs goes.
- Global fields are available more widely across the platform.
You define them in settings, and they then appear on every profile, in the import mapping, in filters and in the export.
Field types
Pick the type that matches the data, because it decides how the field is filled in and how you can filter on it later.
| Type | For |
|---|---|
| Text, multi-line text, rich text | Free text, short or long |
| Number | Anything you count or compare |
| Select, multi-select | A fixed list of choices |
| Yes / No | A simple switch |
| Date, time, date and time | Points in time |
| Image, file, audio, video | Uploads |
A date stored as text cannot be filtered as a date. Choosing the right type at the start saves rebuilding the field once it holds a thousand values.
Who can see and change a field
Each member field carries a visibility setting.
- Editable, the member can change it themselves.
- Read-only, they see it but cannot change it.
- Hidden, only your team sees it.
An internal note about a customer is hidden. Their phone number is usually editable. Their customer number is read-only, because it is yours to set.
Using them
Both tags and fields show up wherever you work with people.
- Filters on your member list: everyone with a tag, everyone whose field matches a condition.
- Saved views built on those filters.
- Bulk actions to add or remove a tag, or set or clear a field, on many people at once.
- Import, where your columns map onto your fields.
- Export, where you choose which fields the file contains.
Working with lists: filters and columns
Which one do I need?
Ask what you will do with it.
- Something is either true of a person or not, and you want to find those people: tag.
- You need to store a value, and later filter, sort or export it: field.
- It should unlock content: group.
Getting this right early keeps your member list useful. Getting it wrong tends to end in forty tags that should have been two fields.