I tell people that targeting audiences is 25% of my business. Doing it effectively is important to drive towards a Nirvana for learning management professionals and moves you away from manual loading users to learning. Here are 5 tips and tricks to start with..,I figure others can tack on.

1. Integrate with a system of record

Your system can support self registration to drive a database of details for your learners and it can drive your groups…but then your instance is left to fat fingering errors. Payroll databases and HRIS databases cut down on that because their metadata on employee is critical for a person to get paid. If at all possible and the use case makes sense? Integrate, integrate integrate.

2. Flatten problems outside of Docebo with your HRIS teams whenever possible

When grouping logic doesn’t support what you want to achieve. For example - Current state you cannot achieve a window of valid dates for example (a person is valid for 30 days putting them in a New Employee group for example). Asking your HRIS colleague for a hand may save you heartache.

3. Automatic groups drive enrollment rules with a catch

Often you will need to go and develop a group to map that group to a learning plan or course. The catch is you will want to do the first mapping by hand if the group has users in it already. So my own order of operations:
- write down your group logic
- test said logic with some ground truthing in excel to QA your criteria
- create a group (set it to automatic)
- add your criteria
- save your changes
- export your group for a quick check of your logic
- create your enrollment rule
- map the group to the LP or Course with the tool
 - hand enroll your learners from the group into the LP/Course
- moving forward your automatic group will support automapping for you

4. Automatic groups can be populated with static users not vice versa

5. Use completions of courses to support automatic group criteria

This idea can trickle curriculum (and new visibility) appropriately

There really is a lot more to it…groups can drive display of menus and pages, drive reporting for compliance types of reports, and lots more.

Don’t overlook their elegance or underestimate their usage.

Maybe one last half tip? Just like content? Groups need curation as well…take your time and develop operations to clean them up on occasion to avoid a hot mess in your instance. For example? I will take older automatic groups and make them static by switching users to manual assignment. I then label the code of the group to express if the group is still in use or not.