Review large membership changes before actions run

Catch an unexpected membership change before actions run

When more people join and leave an audience than the schedule allows, a scheduled run can send an alert, or skip its actions and pause the schedule until someone approves the change. After approval, the next run sends the current members.

Configure a schedule

1. In the audience’s schedule (Schedule or Manage Schedule), open Change approval and turn on Enable change approval.
2. For When the threshold is exceeded, choose Notify only: send an alert, actions still run or Require approval: skip this run’s actions and pause future scheduled execution until an approver decides.
3. Set Change threshold (% of previous size), Minimum change (members), or both. If you set both, the change must reach both.
4. Choose who hears about it: Specific user, Audience owner, or User who scheduled the run. With Notify only, the field is called Who gets alerted and a specific user is picked under User to alert. With Require approval, the same two fields are called Who approves and Approver.
5. Optionally turn on Auto-reject if no decision, then set After (hours). When the time runs out, the run is rejected and the schedule is blocked until someone resumes it; the held actions never run. One exception: if CAB could not compare the members, an expired run is skipped instead; see When the change could not be measured.

What the recipient gets

With Notify only, the person you chose gets the Salesforce notification (under the bell icon) Audience changed more than its threshold. The run’s actions still run, and nobody needs to decide anything. Selecting the notification opens the run.

With Require approval, the approver gets Audience change approval required, and the run waits for a decision (see below).

If your administrator has turned on Also email the approver, the person chosen on the schedule also gets it by email, in both modes.

Make a decision

A held run appears as Change approval required with status Awaiting approval. Review the previous and current sizes, the people who joined and left, the total change, and the held actions. Use View joined members and View left members to see who they are.

A scheduled sequence asks for one decision for the whole sequence, with the figures totalled across its components. Change by component lists each component separately, so you can see which one actually moved.

Select Approve & resume schedule to accept the change and let the schedule continue, or Reject & block schedule and enter a Reason (optional). To come back to the decision later, use the notification card or Open decision in run history.

Approving accepts the change as the new normal and resumes the schedule. The held run’s actions never run — the next scheduled run sends the current members, compared with the members you just accepted. If the audience was on a one-time schedule, it gets a new run so the audience is still sent; that run is checked the same way, so another unexpected change pauses it again.

Rejecting discards the held run and blocks the audience’s scheduled execution until an authorized user resumes it (see below). The next run is still compared with the last accepted members, so if the cause isn’t fixed, the next run after resuming is held again. An automatic rejection after the time limit blocks the schedule the same way.

If the rejected audience is used as a component of one or more audience sequences, those sequences are blocked as well, so a sequence cannot deliver the membership you just rejected. Each blocked audience is resumed separately.

While a run is waiting

• Its scheduled actions do not run — and they never will; approval affects future runs only.
• Later scheduled runs of the audience wait until the decision.
• CAB keeps the run’s members for the review and for the next comparison.
• The schedule resumes after approval, or after rejection once an authorized user unblocks it. If you set a time limit, the run is rejected automatically when it runs out, unless CAB could not compare the members.

When the change could not be measured

Sometimes CAB holds a run without being able to say how much the membership changed — most often because the previous membership it would compare against is no longer available, or because it could not read the schedule’s change-approval settings.

The decision panel says The membership change could not be measured and explains the cause. It shows the run’s size and the actions on hold; how many members joined and left, and the percentage, are not shown.

What happens next depends on the cause:

• The members could not be compared. If the approval expires undecided, the run is skipped without blocking the audience. Nothing is delivered, run history records Skipped · change not measured, and the next scheduled run tries again. If three consecutive runs are skipped this way, the next one is rejected for real and blocks the schedule until an authorized user resumes it. A single successfully measured run in between resets that count.
• The change-approval settings could not be read. An expired approval is rejected and blocks the schedule, exactly as when a threshold is crossed.

You can still approve or reject the run yourself at any point before it expires.

Resume after a rejection

After a rejection, CAB replaces the normal schedule icon with a warning icon in the Status column of the audience list and on the canvas and results action bars. For a scheduled sequence, the warning also appears in the sequence header.

The schedule remains configured: CAB pauses its execution rather than unscheduling it.

The assigned approver or a CAB administrator can resume it in two ways:

• Select the warning action Resume scheduled audience.
• Open Manage Schedule, then select Resume scheduled audience in the blocked-schedule warning.

Review Resume scheduled audience? and confirm.

Other users can see the blocked state on the schedule icon and in Manage Schedule, but cannot resume the schedule.

Resuming does not approve or replay the rejected run. Its remaining actions stay discarded, and the next due run recalculates the audience from fresh data. The next run is compared with the last accepted members, not the rejected ones, so CAB asks for approval again if the unexpected change is still there.

First run:

The first run has nothing to compare with, so CAB lets it run without asking for approval. On a later run, when Require approval: skip this run’s actions and pause future scheduled execution until an approver decides applies but CAB cannot compare the members reliably, it holds the actions for an explicit decision instead of releasing them. Notify only: send an alert, actions still run does not hold actions: without a comparison, the actions run and no alert is sent.

Approval resumes — it does not replay

Approving never sends the paused run’s member list. It answers “is a change this large expected?” — delivery always happens through the next normal scheduled run, with fresh membership.

For admins

CAB Settings → Changes & Approvals → Auditability & Governance → Change approval

First enable Track membership changes between runs. Then set the defaults every schedule starts with; each schedule can change them unless you lock them:

• When a run's membership change crosses the thresholds
• The thresholds Change exceeds (% of previous size) / and is at least (members)
• Send approvals to, an optional time limit, and Also email the approver
• Lock these settings for every schedule to prevent per-schedule overrides

Users with Campaign Audience Builder Admin can resume any rejected scheduled audience. Without that administrator permission, only the approver assigned to the blocking run can resume it.