# Concepts The mental model behind Instasent: organizations and projects, audience, segments, campaigns, automations, channels and senders — and how they fit together. **Language:** en **Audience:** platform **TLDR:** A project holds one audience fed by its data sources; a segment is a dynamic view over that audience, not a separate store of contacts. Campaigns and automations target segments and send through a channel and sender, with delivery governed by each contact's subscription status. **Translation key:** platform.overview.concepts **Search keywords:** concepts, mental model, how instasent works, glossary, terminology, organization, project, projects, workspace, audience, contact, contacts, attribute, attributes, event, events, segment, segments, data source, data sources, campaign, campaigns, automation, automations, sequence, sequences, flows, channel, channels, sender, senders, consent, subscriptions, ai assistant, what is a project, what is a segment **Related pages:** /platform/es/overview/concepts, /platform/en/overview, /platform/en/overview/start-guide, /platform/en/audience, /platform/en/campaigns, /platform/en/channels, /platform/en/data-sources, /platform/en/consent **Docs index (every page):** https://docs.instasent.com/llms.txt **This zone's index:** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/llms.txt **This page:** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/overview/concepts/ (HTML) · https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/overview/concepts.md (Markdown) **Other language (es):** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/es/overview/concepts.md Instasent is built from a handful of concepts that repeat everywhere — in the dashboard, in these guides and in the API. Once you have this map, every screen makes sense. It's a five-minute read. ## The map | Concept | What it is | Where in the dashboard | | -------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------- | | **Organization** | Your account: team, billing, legal profiles. Contains projects. | **Settings → Organization → General** (or Billing, Team…) | | **Project** | A workspace, usually one per brand. Holds everything below. | Project switcher, top of the sidebar | | **Audience** | Your contacts, with their attributes and events. | **Audience → Contacts** | | **Segment** | A saved, dynamic slice of the audience. | **Audience → Segments** | | **Data source** | A way contacts and events come in: CSV, connector, API. | **Audience → Data sources** | | **Channel & sender** | How messages travel (SMS, RCS) and the identity they show. | **Settings → Channels** | | **Campaign** | A one-off send to a segment. | **Campaigns** | | **Automation** | A sequence that messages contacts when they take an action. | **Automations → Sequences** | How it all flows, from data to delivered message: ```mermaid flowchart TD DS[Data sources] -->|contacts and events| AUD[Audience] AUD -->|sliced into| SEG[Segments] SEG -->|targeted by| CAMP[Campaigns] AUD -->|events trigger| AUTO[Automations] CAMP -->|sent via channels| OUT[Delivered messages] AUTO -->|sent via channels| OUT OUT -->|measured in| INS[Insights] ``` ### How they relate A few relationships aren't obvious at a glance and are worth pinning down: - A **project** has **several data sources** but **a single audience**. - A **segment** is a **dynamic view** over the audience, not a container of contacts (see [Segments](#segments)). - A **campaign** always uses **one channel and one sender**. - An **automation** always **sends over a channel**, triggered by an event. And what contains what: ```mermaid flowchart TD P[Project] --> AUD[Audience] P --> CAMP[Campaigns] P --> AUTO[Automations] P --> CH[Channels] AUD --> CON[Contacts] AUD --> SEG[Segments] CH --> SMS[SMS] CH --> RCS[RCS] ``` ## Organization & projects Your **organization** is the account level: the team and its roles, billing and balance, legal profiles, API tokens. Everything you operate day to day lives one level down, inside a **project**. A project is a self-contained workspace: its own audience, segments, senders, brand profile, campaigns and analytics. Most organizations run **one project per brand or product line** — contacts and consent never leak between projects, so two brands stay cleanly separated while sharing the same team and balance. Switch or create projects from the **project switcher** at the top of the sidebar. ## Audience: contacts, attributes & events The **audience** is every contact your project knows, unified into one profile per person. Each contact carries: - **Attributes** — profile fields: name, phone, country, plus any custom field you define, and per-channel subscription status. - **Events** — what the contact does: placed an order, abandoned a cart, clicked a link. Events come in through data sources and power triggers and segments. Contacts arriving from different sources are **deduplicated and merged**, so a customer who exists in your store and your CRM is still one contact. The full model lives in [Audience](/platform/en/audience). ## Segments A **segment** is a saved slice of the audience: contacts matching conditions you combine with AND/OR — over attributes ("country is Spain") and events ("ordered in the last 90 days"). Segments are **dynamic**: contacts enter and leave as their data changes, so a segment is always current when a campaign uses it. A segment **doesn't store contacts of its own**: it automatically shows the audience contacts that match the conditions — closer to a query or a view than to a list. So **deleting a segment doesn't delete its contacts**, and **editing a contact from a segment updates it in the audience** (it's the same contact). Built and managed under **Audience → Segments**. ## Data sources A **data source** is any way contacts and events enter the project: a CSV upload, a native connector (Shopify, HubSpot, Klaviyo and many more), a webhook, or the API. Sources keep syncing once connected — your audience stays live, not a snapshot. See [Data sources & integrations](/platform/en/data-sources). ## Channels & senders A **channel** is the medium a message travels on. Today that's **SMS** (universal reach, every project) and **RCS** (branded, interactive, with automatic SMS fallback) — WhatsApp is coming. A **sender** is the identity your messages show: your brand name on SMS, your verified agent on RCS. Senders are created per project and, in regulated countries, registered with the local regulator before they can send. The whole story lives in [Channels & senders](/platform/en/channels). ## Campaigns A **campaign** is a one-off send: you pick a channel and sender, target segments, write the message and send now or on a schedule. Cost is estimated before you confirm, and results — delivery, clicks, revenue — are attributed back to the campaign. Start with [Creating a campaign](/platform/en/campaigns/creating-a-campaign). ## Automations An **automation** is a message — or a short series of them — that sends itself when a contact does something: a welcome series on signup, a reminder when a cart is abandoned. Today automations are **Sequences**: linear, event-triggered series with delays between messages. A visual canvas for branching journeys is not yet available — it's planned for the future. See [Automations](/platform/en/automations). ## Consent & subscriptions Every send respects the contact's **subscription status** for that channel. Opt-outs (like a STOP reply) are processed automatically, and each campaign carries a compliance policy that decides who it may reach. SMS and RCS share consent — they reach the same phone. The full model is in [Consent & subscriptions](/platform/en/consent). ## AI in the dashboard AI shows up where you work: it writes and rewrites campaign copy in your brand voice inside the editor, and the dashboard's **assistant** answers questions about your project — performance, segments, audience — proposing actions that you approve. You can also connect external AI agents to your account through [Connected apps](/platform/en/developers-and-apps). The overview lives in [AI at Instasent](/platform/en/ai). --- Got the model? Put it to work: the [Start guide](/platform/en/overview/start-guide) takes you from an empty account to your first send. --- This is one page of the Instasent documentation. For the complete machine-readable index of every guide and API reference, fetch https://docs.instasent.com/llms.txt — start there for full context.