Working with your data

Dashboards, audiences, and campaigns all work from the same data: the variables, tables, audiences, files, behaviours, and expressions in your system. Whenever you filter a dashboard, build an audience, add a measure to a tile, or personalise a message, you choose that data in the same dialogue: the data picker.

Once you know the data picker, you know how to choose data anywhere in Orbit. Two things change, depending on what you're doing:

• Its title, such as Select Filter, Select Measure, or Select Variable
• Its tabs, because not everything makes sense everywhere

What you can choose

The data picker gives you six kinds of data. Some come with your system and some you create yourself.

Find what you need

Use the Search tab to find something that already exists. It has up to four tabs of its own:

• Variables: The variables in your system, in their folders
• Tables: Your system's tables, in their hierarchy
• Audiences: Your audiences, and those shared with you, each with its record count
• Files: URN files, FastStats selections, and files of values, in their folders

You can search for an item or browse to it:

• Search: Type in the search box. Each tab then shows how many results it found. Each result shows an icon for its variable type, its name, a short reference, and the folder it's in, so you can tell apart variables with similar names.

  

• Browse: Expand the folders to find the item.

By default, search matches names only, not the categories within a variable. Once you've typed a search, tick Include codes in search to also match the categories within each variable, by their codes or descriptions.

Select an item to choose it. In some places, such as predefined filters and data grid columns, you can choose several at once. The picker shows how many you've selected, and Deselect all clears them.

When only one kind of item makes sense where you are, the picker shows it straight away, with no tabs.

Create a behaviour or an expression

As well as finding data that already exists, you can create a behaviour or an expression in the picker, and use it straight away.

Behaviours

Use the Behaviours tab to create a recency, frequency, or value behaviour, such as each supporter's most recent donation. If the tab doesn't appear, the table you're working with may not have a child table of transactions. See Behaviours for how to create each type.

Expression

Use the Expression tab to write an expression that calculates a value for each record, such as each supporter's age. Enter a Name, choose the Table it calculates for, then write the Expression, using the FastStats expression language. For how to use an expression in each context, see:

• Expressions in audiences
• Expressions as filters on dashboards
• Expression measures on dashboard tiles
• Expressions in message personalisation, where you can also search for expressions saved in FastStats

After you choose

What happens next depends on where you opened the picker:

• A filter: Asks which values to include or exclude. For a variable, that depends on its type. For an audience or a file, you choose whether its records are in or out.
• A measure: Asks how to summarise it, such as Sum or Mean
• A dimension: Asks how to split it into categories, such as by year

Where the data picker opens

These tables list the main places the data picker opens, and what you can choose there. Where you can choose several items at once, the table says so. Anywhere else the picker opens, it works in the same way.

Audiences

When you build an audience or add pages to it, the picker opens in these places:

Dashboards

When you filter a dashboard or edit its tiles, the picker opens in these places:

Inside a behaviour

When you create a behaviour, the picker opens again inside it, for example:

Campaigns

When you set up a campaign, its messages, or its channels, the picker opens in these places:

Resources and settings

The picker also opens when you create custom variables, and in some application settings: