What is an Entity?

Entity(Noun)

1. Anything about which information or data can be stored in a database.
2. Anything with distinct and independent existence.

In Action Builder, entities enable you to organize and track the people and groups most important to your organization, in the way that makes the most sense for your organizers. 

Adding a new entity type creates opportunities to conveniently and strategically categorize those aforementioned people and groups.

By default, each organization starts with the most fundamental entity type: People. You can add individual people to your campaigns, including data about them like their name and contact info. From there, you are free to create an unlimited number of alternative entity types that your organization intends to track. For example, you could add a "Non-profit" entity type to track non-profit organizations, then add individual non-profits with name and contact info to your campaigns.

When adding or editing an entity type, you are given a few essential options:

Entity Type Label (plural and singular): These two fields determine how this entity type will be viewed in different contexts throughout the app. For example, a list of individual persons would be called "People" in the interface, though that label could be changed.

Name (multi or single): This option determines what naming convention should be used when adding a new entity. Eg. "People" may require a first, middle, and last name; "Non-profits", for example, would not.

Address, Date of Birth, Email, Phone, Preferred Language: Each of the remaining options enable you to toggle whether the corresponding data is appropriate when adding or editing an entity of this type.

Entity types can be toggled on our off for certain campaigns in that campaign's administrative settings. You can view which campaigns have an entity type active by clicking the link when viewing the entity type details.