Communication Preferences, Consent, And Solicit Codes: Now And In The Future

Today, on a constituent's record, you can track how and whether they want to receive communications as either consent records or communication preferences.  

• Under Consent, you can manage which types of communications and channels a constituent has opted in or out of. For example, a constituent may prefer to receive all communications through email, or event invitations by mail and only newsletters through email. 
• Under Communication preferences, you can manage specific rules of contact with the constituent, such as to not call after 8:00 p.m. or on weekends. If you're familiar with database view terminology, you may also know these as solicit codes.

However, we've heard from you that the management of these preferences, while powerful and flexible, can be confusing. As you may've seen during our recent Roadmap updates, we're hard at work building a new model to help capture and manage your constituents' communication preferences in a more intuitive and less ambiguous way. 
   
What's changing right now?  
In the coming weeks, communication preferences in the web view will become solicit codes.

• On a constituent record, you'll manage these preferences under Solicit codes, not Communication preferences.
• On a constituent list, you'll use Marketing filters records based on their solicit codes, not communication preferences. 

Note that this is purely a terminology change; all functionality remains the same for the time being. Not only does this match how these preferences appear in the database view, but it'll also help distinguish them from the enhanced communication preference tracking coming further down the road. After this change, communication preferences will no longer be synonymous with solicit codes.
  
What's coming down the road? 
As mentioned, we're building improved communication preference tracking for your constituents. In the future, you'll be able to manage enhanced, cross-channel preferences under Communication and data preferences (rather than Consent). With these new communication preferences, you'll be able to:

• Track when constituents grant or revoke consent for communication and data processing.
• Record specific choices your organization makes regarding whether, how, and about what topics to communicate with constituents.
• Eliminate the need to use solicit codes (which have a tendency to be ambiguous and inefficient).

If your organization relies heavily on solicit codes today, don't worry! We know that the transition to using this new model will take some time, so solicit codes won't be going anywhere right away. However, we believe that the enhancements we're building will give you a far superior model for managing these preferences. When you can track more specific data about how constituents want to be communicated with, you can connect with them more effectively and expect higher engagement. 
  
Want to learn more about what's new and coming soon to Raiser's Edge NXT? Tune in to our Roadmap Webinars, where experts from our product development team recap what we've been working on over the past few months and share exciting details about updates coming your way.