User groups are the role(s) any user has within your LMS. When a user logs into your LMS, Impact replicates their LMS Role(s) in our system.

User Groups are defined by your institution and how it is broken down within your LMS. This can be on a course basis, department basis, or however else you’ve structured your institution. Your institution might use course roles, hierarchy roles, subaccounts, or custom roles to categorize users by departments, schools, faculty groups, and more. This is then reflected within your Impact dashboard.

The reflection of these Groups in your Impact dashboard also allows you to group, categorize, compare, examine and target specific user types within your institution. With the alignment between your LMS and Impact user roles, you can confidently assign campaigns, Impact content, and reporting to the correct users.

When you see the word Profile in your target audience options, this is another way of referring to the User Roles imported from your LMS (this includes institutional hierarchy roles, subaccounts, course roles, and any other custom roles that you create from your LMS). These profiles are solely dependent on the way your LMS has organized specific roles within your institution.

Profiles can differ on an institution and LMS basis. For example, you could have roles such as CourseRole_Instructors, CourseRole_Students, as well as some custom Roles you’ve created for specific user types.

You can think of User Groups as containers for User Roles that are collected by Impact from your LMS. Having User Groups is particularly useful when you want to assign campaigns or Impact content to a specific group of LMS users.

User Groups are automatically generated and added to your Impact dashboard depending on your collected User Roles. In the User Groups page of your Impact dashboard, you can see all of the roles registered within the Impact system, including their unique Impact ID, name, live user count, current categorization, and visibility status.

You can see and organize all your User Groups from this User Groups page. To learn about organizing User Roles and Groups, read this article.

With Impact, you can also create Custom User Groups. This Impact feature allows you to create a User Group right from within the Impact Dashboard and tailor these groups to contain custom characteristics that you are interested in targeting.

User Categories are a way of organizing your User Roles and Groups with Impact. You can assign your User Roles and Groups to Categories based on your institution's needs. This is especially useful when you want to target a larger audience (such as ALL students or ALL instructors). Example categories can be Instructors, Students, and Staff. The User Roles and Groups that go into these categories are completely dependent on your institution, and you can categorize them as you wish.

Overall, User Categories are an easy way to assign multiple User Groups in an efficient manner and capture larger audiences.

Filters are another way of choosing your target audience for a specific piece of content or report. Filters are created as a result of Tool Adoption Reports and refer to users that have or have not been using a tool over a specified timeframe. With these filters, you can really isolate users based on their behaviors or usage within the LMS.

By now, you are probably familiar with the way Impact allows you to create campaigns. Once you create a campaign and assign it to a target audience, you can select that campaign as a target audience from other places within your Impact dashboard. For example, if you create a new message, and you want to add it to an existing campaign, you can select that campaign as your target audience. The same goes for all Impact content. In addition, if you want to view reports specific to a campaign, you can select that campaign as a filter within your Insights page.

If you are assigning a message or support article to a campaign, once you select a campaign as an audience, this help item is added to that campaign’s help item overview.

The majority of your Impact features allow or require you to assign specific audiences. User Roles, Profiles User Groups, Categories, Filters, and Campaigns make up these audiences and allow you to feel confident that the correct users see your Impact content and appear on reports. You’ll see these audience options in the following places:

• Reporting Templates are assigned to a target audience.
• The following Reports in your Impact dashboard have filters related to target audiences:
  • Tool Adoption Report
  • Course Activity Report
  • Support Button Usage Report
  • Support Escalation Route Report
• Support Routing options can be assigned to a target audience.
• Support articles and Messages can be assigned to a target audience.
• Campaigns can be assigned to a target audience.
• Support Center Categories can be assigned to a target audience.