Recording mailing lists / subscription to magazines

Claire Shadbolt

Our organisation has been using RE for a long time and brought bad habits with them. We have people opt into our supporter magazine and onto mailing lists for emails, but we shoehorn these into a weird place on RE.


How do others record that a constituent has opted into a mailing list?


And what about preferences on that mailing list, eg that they need 20 copies of the magazine, or they want it without a plastic wrapper.

Elaine Tucker

You can do this through either solicit code or constituent code; I'd lean toward constituent code. To track specific things like 20 copies, or no wrapper, create a constituent attribute named "Subscription" and then either have it a free text field or create a table with all possible notations needed. That way you can run a query for those with the solicit or constituent code AND with the subscription attribute so you can segment your list accordingly

Melanie Cardullo

We actually create mailing list attributes, and those supercede any solicit code opt-outs. For example, a constituent has a "do not email" solicit code, but also requests to receive the School of Medicine quarterly e-newsletter. If we only relied on solicit codes, then the constituent would be excluded from the newsletter email.