Lists and contacts are the audience side of Newsroom. A contact is one person (with an email and some properties). A mailing list is a group of contacts. Campaigns are sent to lists; lists are made up of contacts.
Contacts
Every person who can receive Newsroom emails is a contact. PortalHQ populates contacts automatically from your SIS:
- Parents become contacts via the SIS sync.
- Staff become contacts via the SIS sync.
- Students become contacts (typically with the school email address) where appropriate.
- External contacts can be added manually (alumni, vendors, prospective families).
Each contact has:
- Email address (the only required field).
- First and last name.
- Custom fields (year group, campus, role, anything else your school tracks).
- Subscription status — subscribed, unsubscribed or bounced.
- Tag — auto-tags applied based on signups, activities, etc.
See Importing existing contacts for the contact import workflow.
Mailing lists
A mailing list groups contacts for sending. Most schools have lists like:
- All Parents — every active parent.
- Year 7 Parents — parents of Year 7 students.
- Staff — all teaching and support staff.
- Sport Squads — auto-populated from co-curricular signups.
- Alumni — past students, manually managed.
Lists are either:
| Type | How it’s populated |
|---|---|
| Static | You add contacts manually. Members stay in the list until you remove them. |
| Dynamic (rule-based) | Members are determined by rules (e.g. all contacts with custom field “Year Group” = “7”). Auto-updates as contact attributes change. |
See Segmenting your contact database for dynamic lists.
How lists relate to other modules
Other PortalHQ modules can auto-populate lists. The most common:
- Co-Curricular — every activity group generates a Newsroom tag, and contacts of students in the group are auto-added to that tag. Use this to send a campaign to parents of Year 9 Hockey Squad without manually maintaining the list.
- Slips — parents who haven’t completed an active slip can be a dynamic list.
- Booked Events — bookers of a specific event can be a dynamic list.
These integrations remove most of the manual list-maintenance work.
Unsubscribes
PortalHQ honours unsubscribes automatically. When a recipient clicks unsubscribe:
- They land on a page confirming the unsubscribe.
- Optionally they provide a reason.
- Their contact is flagged unsubscribed.
- Future campaigns from any list skip them.
To re-subscribe an unsubscribed contact:
- They re-subscribe themselves via a public re-subscribe form.
- Or you flip the flag manually on their contact record (only do this if you have clear consent).
Bounces
Hard bounces (the address doesn’t exist) automatically flag the contact as bounced. Future campaigns skip them. Soft bounces (mailbox full, temporary issue) are retried.
Regularly review the bounced contacts list and clean up — typically by re-confirming the email with the parent or removing the contact entirely.
Contact privacy
Contacts contain personal information — names, emails, sometimes phone numbers and other custom fields. Treat them with the same care as student records:
- Limit access to staff who need it.
- Honour unsubscribes and deletion requests promptly.
- Don’t export contact lists outside PortalHQ unless necessary.
Where to start
- Importing your existing list: Importing existing contacts.
- Setting up segmentation: Segmenting your contact database.
- Understanding tags and auto-population: see the Co-Curricular and Booked Events categories.