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Contact Lists

Building internal contact lists

Filters, rebuilding, and the two labels that mean the opposite of what you would expect.

Last updated September 2, 2026

A contact list is a saved set of rules that resolves to a group of people — "every tribe manager", "everybody in the Marketing department", "all vendor contacts". Build them under Internal Contact Lists.

How the filters work

Each list holds one or more filter cards. Within a card, choose Match any filter or Must match all filters. Pick who it looks at — Organisation People, Tribe People, External People — then filter on Departments, Positions, Roles, Skills, Badges, Groups or Vendors.

Several filter cards on one list are combined together, so each card adds more people rather than narrowing further.

Two confusing labels

"DISABLED" DOES NOT MEAN "IGNORE THIS FILTER"

Choosing Disabled as a filter value narrows the list to nobody, rather than switching the criterion off. If you want to stop filtering on something, set it to All or remove the filter. A list that suddenly resolves to zero people has usually had a Disabled left in it.

FILTERING ON VENDORS CREATES TEAM MEMBER RECORDS

Adding a vendor contacts filter does not just select people — it creates a team member record for every vendor contact in your organisation so they can be included. Your People directory grows as a side effect of building the list. That is intended, but it surprises everybody the first time.

Rebuilding a list

Lists update themselves as people are added and as roles and positions change. After a big structural change — a reorganisation, a bulk import, moving people between tribes — press Reload to rebuild from scratch.

WHY A FULL REBUILD IS DIFFERENT

The automatic updates cannot remove somebody who has stopped being a tribe person, and will not reinstate a recipient whose email previously bounced. Only a full reload fixes those. If a list looks stale, reload it before assuming it is broken.

A rebuild replaces everybody the rules found, but leaves anybody you added by hand in place.

Importing a list

You can import people from a spreadsheet — upload, say whether they are organisation, tribe or external people, and match your columns. Bear in mind this creates team member records, not just list entries.

Checking a list before you use it

Open it and read the recipients. Export it if it is long. It is much cheaper to find a wrong list here than after you have emailed or texted everybody on it.

Next · Contact ListsInternal emails and text messages