Online express - email to unique records that may contain dupliacte emails addresses

Charlie Jackett · August 2019

Hi,

When using Online express to register people to events, allowing them to register more than one person quite often means they use the same email addresses for each person but when you come to email all attendees, OLX automatically removes these duplicate emails when in fact, we want one email to go to every person entering that event regardless of whether the email is listed for a different constituent or not. E.g. a confirmation of attendance email confirming all of a person's details prior to an event therefore we want every attendee to have one email with their details on so if someone has registered 5 different people using their email address, that person receives 5 emails each with a different name on.

How do we do this?

Chris Martin · August 2019

Hi Charlie. This unfortunately isn't possible today. As you mentioned, OLX de-duplicates all outbound emails so that each email job will only get sent to one email address. When we implemented this feature, we understood the consequence would be that if you ever specifically wanted to send the same email to the same email address multiple times, you wouldn't be able to. But our assessment in talking with customers was that it was more important to mitigate the risk of inadvertently (and undesirably) sending the same email to the same recipient multiple times than it was to allow duplicates to be sent out.

I'd love for others to weigh in on the value of always auto-suppressing duplicates versus not.

Charlie Jackett · September 2019

Thanks for the reply Chris.

I've seen elsewhere on TRE, I believe when setting up a query, that you can check a box to either remove (or not) duplicates from that query. Rather than trying to be one thing to fit every situation, could you not provide a similar check box to choose whether to surpress duplicates or not?

This would be especially useful when using an OLX form for event registrations as it's quite common place for one person (a family member, running club, cycling club, etc.) to carry out multiple registrations and take responsibility for each person taking part in that event. At the same time, we as event organisers need the ability to account for every individual taking part in an event regardless of the email used - for example, a registration confirmation that participants need to use to collect a name badge, event packs, etc.

Currently, not having this facility means us using Outlook to send some emails and OLX to send others to ensure everyone is accounted for, not great for GDPR compliance and also administrativley adds additional workload to what should be a simple click of a button (or check box) to send.

Chris Martin · September 2019

Thanks for this Charlies. Yes we have actually talked about just letting the content author (or "email sender") choose whether to suppress duplicates. We'll kick the tires on what it would take to make that possible. Under the hood, it's a fair bit more complicated than just giving the user a toggle setting, but I definitely see the value in your use case.

Thanks!

Chris

Online express - email to unique records that may contain dupliacte emails addresses

Comments

Categories