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Hey everyone, welcome back to another SwiftFox Masterclass. Circles are a brand new feature in SwiftFox and honestly, one we're really excited about. They allow you to create isolated workspaces for your staff, segmenting their contacts and data so that everyone in your organisation sees exactly what they need to see and nothing they don't. Now, who's ready for a deep dive on circles?

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Here's the challenge that so many of our organisations face. You've got one SwiftFox CRM. All of your data lives there, but your organisation is one team. You might have branches across the country or even across the world. Regional offices, state teams, sub branches. Historically, managing data across all of these systems and groups in a single CRM has been complicated.

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You either end up giving people too much access, or you're forced to run separate systems and duplicate your data circles. So set all of your organisation's data continues to exist like normal inside SwiftFox. Circles doesn't change that, what they do is control which parts of your database each team can see based on a set of rules you define.

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Let me give you a couple of examples just to make it concrete for a large multinational organisation. Circles might be based on countries. If someone lives in Australia, their record is managed by the Australian team. If they live in the UK, they managed by the UK team. Circles are clean, simple and automatic. For a union you might be more layered.

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You might have state branches and within those sub branches based on an organisation that a member works at. When a person's details change, say they move states or they change their employer, they automatically move into the right circle. Your team never has to manually reassign someone, SwiftFox handles it for you. From the CRM side of things, each circle has its own dashboards tailored to that team's view, lists scoped to their records, automations so local workflows don't interfere with other team's, forms for their specific needs and financial settings so that payment processing can be configured per circle.

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This is local autonomy built right into SwiftFox. Users or user groups can be assigned to one or more circles. If a user only has access to one circle, they can only work with that circle's data. It's as if the rest of the database doesn't even exist. But if they belong to multiple circles, they can seamlessly switch between them.

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Now let's talk about how circles are structured. There are three levels segments, workspaces, and hubs. Think of them like this. Segments are your building blocks. Workspaces are where your teams live and hubs sit at the top, pulling everything together. Let's go through them one by one. A segment is a set of rules used to break up your database.

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These rules are built using list conditions. The same powerful conditions that you're used to in SwiftFox Lists. They determine which records belong to a particular segment. In many cases, these are location based, but you can use any list condition available to you industry, employer, membership status, whatever makes sense for your organisation. Think of segments as the building blocks of your entire circle ecosystem.

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Contacts can technically belong to multiple segments, but the best setups have them in just one. Clean, unambiguous assignment means your team always know exactly who belongs to which circle. Workspaces is where your users typically work day to day. It usually represents a branch, a team, or region of your organisation. One or more segments are assigned to a workspace and that's what determines which records the users in that workspace can see.

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You might also have some overlap between workspaces. Let's say you have had Melbourne North workspace, a Melbourne South workspace and a Greater Melbourne workspace. These three might share some segments, but they’re used by different teams in your organisation.

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Each team will have their own lists, emails and events, so the same record might appear in both the Melbourne North and the Greater Melbourne Workspace. But the Greater Melbourne team had their own communications, their own lists and their own events.

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Finally, we've got hubs. Hubs set at the top of your circle structure and group everything related together. They're also where data can be shared across workspaces. For example, a list or template created at the hub level is automatically shared down to all of its workspaces.

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This is how a national team can push resource out to all of its branches, without having to log into every single one. For larger organisations, hubs can also be nested, allowing you to match even the most complex of organisational structures. A hub of hubs, if you like.

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One more thing worth noting. While most users will work within a workspace, access can also be set down to the segment level if you need that granularity.

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So in our example, most users will have access to a branch covering many states. But you can also have a user or user group that can access only the Queensland segment specifically. Total flexibility. Total control.

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So to recap segments, define which records belong together using list conditions that you already know. Workspaces group those segments for a team. Your branches, your regions, your departments and hubs group related workspaces together and that you share data and resources across them. Together, these three levels let you organize your organisation inside SwiftFox. And control exactly what parts of your database each team can see, all without duplicating data, running separate systems, or losing central oversight.

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We are so pleased to be launching circles in SwiftFox. This has been one of the most requested features from organisations across associations, unions, charities, and more. We can't wait to see the possibilities that it opens up for you. If you have any questions on setting up circles for your organisation, reach out to our support team or check out the SwiftFox Academy for step by step tutorials. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you in the next one.