Why are all my new constituents opted out of emails?

John Geoffrion 3

Rookie question, probably.

I recently imported a list of 1200+ new constituent records into LO. It went fine, except that they all appear to have "Accept Email" = No, and they ought to be "Yes."

I've attempted to update this multiple times, basically attempting to over-write the No with a Yes, or a True, or a Y, but nothing appears to work.

We are itching to send these folks a welcome email, but we're kinda stuck until this is fixed.

Any thoughts? Is there a painfully obvious setting that I forgot about?

Thanks,

John G, DB Admin, NCTE.

Philip Nawrocki

Hey John,


You are not going to like this answer, but this is the answer I got from support many moons ago.

There is no way to mass resubscribe opt-ed out users. You must manually change this. A constituent can opt back into email through the profile screen.

This is a an email protection, otherwise admins would be re-subscribing users all the time. To be in compliance with CAN-SPAM, you need some sort of authorization to opt users back in, be it in writing or an email.


Since you just had an import go haywire, I would contact support and see if they can help.


A good rule of thumb with imports is to import the first 5 records of your overall file first to make sure the import is doing what you want (check one of the constituents you did an import on to validate the correct action was taken). Then you can import the rest.


Bummer for sure.


Thanks,


Phil

Brian Mucha

Custom Cons Import offers the Accept Email field.

There's even some specific help when that field is selected: "Luminate sets to Y if email is accepted or to N if not. Flip or reverse this value if your database sets N if email accepted and Y if not."


It sure leads you to believe it works. Does it just fail or not actually change?


BPM

Dennis Ladnier

John, not sure this is within your capability however you can write some simple python web-scraping code to 'automate' (i.e. emulate the keystrokes) to change these back to 'accept mail'. It would be a huge time-saver plus position yourself should you ever need to redo it in the future.

Brian Mucha

Or you could use the Cons API Update method and some JS or JQuery in a PageBuilder page to do them all.


I'd put all of the cons ids into an array, and then $.each through that to make each update.


Make that page Admin only, so the user has rights to update.



Or at the very least, you can use Excel with the concatenate and hyperlink formulas to add clickable links to each cons record in a Luminate Report. That will save you all the searching and opening of each record. Just click a link, check the box, and click save.


The URL to open a cons record in edit mode looks like this:
https://secure3.convio.net/ABC/admin/ConsProfileAdmin?op.editCons=&consID=12345678


So add a column to your list of bad users with a formula something like:


=HYPERLINK(CONCATENATE("https://secure3.convio.net/ABC/admin/ConsProfileAdmin?op.editCons=&consID=", C2), " Click Me")


I use this trick all the time with Luminate.


BPM

Shannon Flynn

John,

We had a similar situation this summer and Blackbaud was able to do the global opt in for us. There are a number of steps and it takes a bit of time but they successfully opted in a large group that had been erroneously opted out for us.

We just put in a case requesting their help and also, this KB article outlines what they'll do and what they'll need from you: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/110761

John Geoffrion 3

Ah that's marvelous information, Shannon, thanks a lot! (And thanks to everyone else who replied)