How to deal with chapters' email lists

Ram Basu · July 2023

We have many chapters that have their own email lists. Right now, they're using a variety of ESPs (MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.) to manage those lists separately from our main list. We'd like to bring them “in house” in Luminate Online (which we use only for email management at this point). Here are some of our questions:

What's the best way to segment/tag chapter list constituents? (Note that all sign-ups come in via our own website forms, with API connections pushing needed field info into Luminate.) Would it be a group? An interest? Something else? To the best of my knowledge, none of our chapters is currently sending to audience segments of their lists; all emails from chapters go to the full subscriber list for that chapter.
How can we ensure that chapter staff who are given logins have the following permissions?
- be able to see and work with ONLY those constituents who have signed up for their chapter email list
- be able to send to ONLY “their” people
- be able to see and work with only their own emails (perhaps in their own campaign)
- be prevented from deleting constituents
How can we ensure that someone unsubscribing from a chapter email does not unsubscribe from ALL of the emails from our organization? A chapter “unsubscribe” should only remove the constituent from the chapter-defining group/interest/whatever.

Thanks for any guidance on this. ?

Jeremy Reynolds · August 2023

@Ram Basu Here's what I'd do to segment:

Add a custom field for chapter to cons records.
During form submission, use javascript to set a hidden field that updates said custom field in cons records.
Create a “Chapter Messaging” interest. Everyone who fills the form gets opted into that.
Use LO queries to create groups for each chapter, and those are your email groups, and chapter messaging interest on all emails to that group.
If people choose “unsub from this interest” instead of “unsub from everything,” you're golden.

As for access restrictions, security categories are the way I'd expect to go there. Could be a little painful to make sure you don't have “anyone can access” content in LO, but you should be able to select what a given login can see based on security category. I believe you can restrict admin permissions down to being view only on cons records, but don't quote me on it.

Ram Basu · September 2023

@Jeremy Reynolds thanks so much for these ideas. I'll explore.

Anyone else reading this — Any other strategies come to mind? TIA.

How to deal with chapters' email lists

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