Adding Email Interests from CMS forms and external site forms

Andrew MacKay

Hi, We’re currently attempting to create a way to add people into particular email interest(s) who fill out any of our forms on our CMS pages as well as on external sites we have.  This would need to be a “modular” solution that can be used on a large number of different forms, and each form will define which email interests to add the user to.  The user may or may not be logged into the site before filling in the form.  The idea I came up with was to add a hidden “scraped” survey onto the “thank you” page that comes up after submitting the initial form.  The survey would contain the constituent data question (first name, last name, email) as well as a hidden interest update with the 4 interests that can be added by each form and would submit automatically using JavaScript.  I tested adding only certain interests to the scraped form (ie. removing the html code for 1 or more of the 4 interests that are included in the hidden interest question on the survey) and discovered that the ones that are left off are unsubscribed for the user filling in the form.  I similarly tested using the non-hidden “Interest Categories” question and again if either a checkbox is left out or not checked off then the user is unsubscribed from the Interest if they were subscribed before.  For my solution to work it would need to just add a person to the interest defined for the particular form and leave their other interests alone.  The only work-around I can think of at this point is to create a separate survey for each interest category (or combinations we might want to add at the same time), but it seems like a lot of over-head.  Anyone have any ideas, or are using other methods to accomplish what we're trying to do?

Thanks,

Andrew

 

Brian Mucha

Rather than using a survey, you could jump fully into the API and use Cons CreateOrUpdate, though the authentication requirement might not be convenient,


http://open.convio.com/api/#constituent_api.createOrUpdate_method.html

Andrew MacKay

Thanks Brian - I'll look into what you've suggested further

Brian Mucha

And of course, https://github.com/noahcooper/luminateExtend