Creating and updating a smart group

Searching for contacts and doing something with the set of results is a day-to-day task in CiviCRM. For example, you might want to find all your contacts that live in Alaska and send them a mail shot. This is pretty easy to do in Advanced Search, and you can add all the contacts you find into a group called Alaska. This means that you can always go back to the group and find the contacts you added. The group represents a snapshot of your data that you took when you did the search and added contacts to the group.

The problem is that if new contacts are added into CiviCRM who live in Alaska, you will have to remember to add them to the group, and you will have to remove them from the group if they move from Alaska.

To overcome this problem, CiviCRM has smart groups. Smart groups automatically contain any contacts that match your search criteria. So, if the data in your contacts changes, or contacts are added or removed, this is reflected dynamically in the smart group without you having to do anything.