Sharing my Adaptive Card and Power Automate template: Donor Portal Email Preferences

Glen Hutson

- Description: Two flows: 1) A flow that assembles an Adaptive Card to display in the RENXT Donor Portal “My Profile” area to allow Constituents to update consent-record-based email preferences. 2) A flow that processes the updates.

- Required connections: SKY Add-Ins, RENXT Constituents, RENXT Interactions

- Suggested skill level required to use this template: Beginner

- Category: Data Management

- Instructions: Full instructions available at https://github.com/glenhutson/BlackbaudCustomizations/tree/main/Raiser's-Edge-NXT/RENXT%20Portal%20Email%20Preferences

Having worked with tools going all the way back to NetSolutions (THAT is a blast from the past), definitely have seen the wide range of approaches of tracking email preferences/interests. The ever changing regulations has certainly added some wrinkles.

What’s included in this example/template is one approach and the thought is that this would be a starting off point, but may not immediately fit every scenario.

This utilizes consent records for individual selections as well as the “Requests no email” for the global opt-out. An Adaptive Card shows options to the constituent with any prior selections already filled in. Where options aren’t already on record, a “Please select an option” is shown. If they don’t select an option, it is recorded as a “No Response”.

Every selection is written back to the system, even if it’s not a change. As consent records maintain a history, this can serve to show a “re-confirmation” of those selections.

What is not automatically tracked historically is the “Requests no Email”. To facilitate that, an action is written to the constituent record that tracks this (along with the other selections) to help fill in those historical pieces.

If you’re using RENXT Email, keep in mind that for creating lists, you have to map consent selections to Solicit Codes. Also recall that there are several factors that are taken into account to determine if an email address is included in a message send. You can review the suppression criteria at https://webfiles-sc1.blackbaud.com/support/helpfiles/rex/content/email-suppression-criteria.html .

A few notes about the approaches in these flows:

1) Variables are avoided unless data could change through the course of the flow. If it’s more of a ‘static’ holding of data (such as a configuration option), Compose actions are used. This helps in portability/reusability.

2) ‘Apply to each’ is avoided as much as possible to speed up run time. There are some cases where one would have to use it, such as if you can only add a Consent record one at a time. Depending on scenario, (faster) alternatives include creative uses of ‘Select’ actions (used in this example) or XML/Xpath conversions.