Multiple Email Opt-Outs

Kit Briem

We want to give our donors and friends more options when they ask to opt-out of emails. For example, someone may want to opt out of fundraising emails but may want the monthly enewsletter.


Where is the best place to store that information and how?  The best idea I'm coming up with are multiple email addresses with an email "address" per opt-out/in option.  For example:


fundraising emails: kbriem@unitedseminary.edu 

enewsletter emails: kbriem@unitedseminary.edu

alum news emails: kbriem@unitedseminary.edu

arts events emails: kbriem@unitedseminary.edu


I could then mark Do Not Contact for the appropriate email.


Do you have other ideas or best practices to recommend?


Thanks in advance for your help.


 

Cuyler Smith

Your best bet is to use the Solicit Code functionality in RE and craft some custom solicit codes that fulfill your needs. 


Be sure to look into Best Practices for the use of Solicit Codes.  You'll want to make sure that you use a "Do Not" (exclusion), rather than a "Do" (inclusion) for Solicit Codes. 


So, for example, you could have: Do Not Send Fundraising Emails, Do Not Send eNewsletter Emails, etc. as your solicit codes.  You can have multiple solicit codes specified per constituent, so you can capture the granularity that you're looking for here.  Also, in Mail, Export, etc. you can use solicit codes to include/exclude certain constituents.  It's what they were designed for (ex. mailings)! 

Jen Claudy

My recommendation would be to use Attributes, one for each Fundraising, eNewsletter, Alum News, Arts Events (personally I would put them in as eFundraising, eNewsletter, eAlumNews, eArtsEvents...so they end up all together in the Attributes dropdown).  Then you can have a Table behind your Description field, with whatever options you want (create one table and set all 4 attributes to use that one), add a date whenever a selection is added/updated, and a comment (if the comment is too long, or you want to copy and paste an email from a constituent, you can put "see ConstNote" and put it in Notes).


Since you're not posting in the Online Express (OLX) topic, I'm not sure what your email system is...if you are using OLX, you can only (currently, at least) use up to 3 email Phone Types to send messages.  And I think you would have to jump back and forth in OLX Configuration every time you sent a message.


If Solicit Codes and Attributes aren't working for you, I would then suggest putting a code of some sort in the Phone Type Comment (assuming you're on 7.95)...a single digit (number or letter) to indicate each of your 4 message types, but not duplicating the email address.


Ultimately, you should test out a couple of different scenarios with a group of staff records (so you can send lots of test messages and know exactly what will happen throughout the process).  Or a group of dummy records but using staff email addresses.

Melissa S Graves

I, too, recommend solicit codes or attributes (wherever you store other communication restriction codes). Depending on your email system you may or may not be able to pull from phones. I remember Luminate Online only pulled ONE email type when it synced so this would not work for anyone on LO.

Alan French

We use the same process as Jennifer has described: attributes with categories of eNewsletter, faculty mailings etc. The description field is a yes/no dropdown.


For me the major benefit of using attributes over solicit codes is that you can choose to allow a maximum of 1 of each attribute type per constituent record. When we first started using RE we were using solicit codes, and there were a number of people who had both "Send eNewsletter" and "Do Not Send eNewsletter" codes on their record and we had no way to tell which should supersede the other as we couldn't tell when they had been added. Using this feature of attributes removes one data cleansing headache from my list