If you’re building emails in the Engaging Networks Broadcast module, you already know that a one-size-fits-all message rarely performs as well as something tailored to your audience. Conditional content in EN gives you the ability to show different copy, images, and links to different segments, all within a single email build. It saves time, reduces the risk of sending to the wrong list, and makes your campaigns feel more relevant to the people receiving them. This walkthrough covers exactly how to set it up, from building your profiles through to testing and scheduling your send.

What Is Conditional Content in Engaging Networks?

Conditional content lets you swap out specific sections of an email based on a supporter’s profile. Instead of building and managing multiple separate emails for different segments, you build one email and layer in variations for each audience. Each variation is tied to a profile you create in EN’s Data module, and anything not covered by a profile falls back to your default version.

Step 1: Build Your Profiles First

Before you open a single email build, set up your profiles. You can technically do this at any point, but doing it upfront means you won’t be jumping back and forth between the Data and Broadcasts modules mid-build.

1. Log in to EN and navigate to Data and Reports in the top navigation
2. Under Data, select Profiles
3. Click New Profile in the top left corner
4. Give it a clear name and add any notes in the description field so your team knows what it’s for

Setting Up the Email Opt-In Filter

In the filters section, search for “question responses” in the dropdown and click Add filter. In the field next to “find supporters whose response to:” enter your email opt in, then set the value to Y. This ensures your profile only includes people who have actively opted in to email communications. It’s a simple step, but it’s an important safeguard.

Building the Right Filter Combination for Your Profile

The email opt-in filter is a good baseline for every profile, but what defines each profile beyond that is entirely up to you. EN gives you a wide range of filters to work with, and you can combine as many as you need to get the right group.

Some common options include:

• Constituent data – filter by fields like city, region, or any other demographic data in your supporter records
• Question responses – target supporters based on how they answered a specific question
• Fundraising filters – segment by donation amount, total giving, or recurring gift status
• Email activity – filter by open, click, or conversion behavior within a set timeframe
• Last participation date – target supporters based on when they last engaged with an advocacy or donation page

You can use AND logic to narrow your group (supporters must match every filter) or OR logic to broaden it (supporters need only match one). The right combination depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with each version of the email.

Once you’ve added your filters and saved the profile, it’s ready to use in your email build.

Step 2: Select Your Send Audience

Before you start building your email content, set up your audience in the Audience tab of your broadcast. This is where you’ll select the Segment for your send, and it’s an important step to get right before you dive into the conditional content build.

The Segment you select here should include all of the supporters who were set up across your profile builds. Think of it this way: your audience defines who receives the email, and your profiles determine which version each person sees. If a segment isn’t represented in both places, those supporters either won’t receive the email or won’t get the right version.

Taking a few minutes to align your audience and profiles at this stage will save you from having to troubleshoot a mismatch later.

Step 3: Add Conditional Content to Your Email Build

Build your base email first. This is your fallback version, the content that displays for anyone who doesn’t match a profile. Get that version complete before you start adding conditional layers.

Selecting Profiles and Navigating Versions

Once your base is ready, click on the section of the email you want to customize. A small icon will appear on the left side of that section, inside a blue border. Click it, and you’ll be prompted to search for and select the profiles you want to apply to that section. As you select profiles, they’ll appear in the menu below the search field with a toggle to enable or disable each one.

After you’ve added your profiles, you’ll notice numbers appear where the icon was. Hovering over them shows you which profile each number corresponds to, and the one highlighted in red indicates the version you’re currently editing. A blue banner at the top of the email editor also tells you which version is active. If the banner appears gray, that means you have the fallback version selected. From there, you can go into the editor and update images, copy, and links for each profile variation. As you swap in images for each variation, keep in mind that image-heavy emails can affect deliverability. Our post on how image-heavy emails hurt engagement is worth a read if you haven’t already.  For every section you want to customize, you’ll need to repeat this process by clicking the icon after selecting that section.

When your updates are complete, use the dropdown in the blue banner to review each version and confirm everything looks right.

What the Fallback Version Does

One thing worth understanding: any section where conditional content is not enabled will behave as a shared section. Important: edits you make to the fallback version of those sections will apply across all versions. Keep that in mind as you build so you don’t accidentally overwrite something you meant to keep separate.

Step 4: Test and Schedule Your Send

Before you schedule, test the email. Navigate to the Testing tab and inside the white box you’ll see two toggles: “Select All” and “Send all variations of conditional content.” Turn on the second toggle, and when you send yourself a test, you’ll receive every version of the email. This is the only reliable way to confirm each variation is rendering correctly before it goes to your list.

When you’re ready to schedule, confirm that your audience segments are still aligned with the profiles you built. If anything has changed, update them before sending.

A Real-World Example

For Sharp Healthcare’s Doctors’ Day campaign, we used conditional content to personalize emails across different hospitals within the same market. Each hospital got its own profile, and we took the opportunity to tailor the copy throughout so every version felt like it was written specifically for that audience. The result was a campaign that felt locally relevant without requiring a separate build for every send. It’s a straightforward use case, but it shows how much lift you can get from a relatively simple setup.

If you’re working through something similar in EN and want a second set of eyes on your setup or strategy, we’d love to help. Book a call with the Doing Good Digital team and let’s talk through what’s possible for your next campaign.