Email Consent -- Opt Out Requests

Keith Wilson · September 2021

We have Org records with more than one contact person at the organization. If one person at that Org decides to opt out of receiving emails, then do you still email the other contacts at that Org? If so, how do you handle the Consent and/or Solicit Code on Bio1? It seems the only thing we can do is delete the email that opted out and then remove the Consent tied to that email address, otherwise NXT suppresses that Org from receiving emails altogether. However, I personally don't like doing so because if that email address resurfaces and we no longer have record of the consent, it could be poor donor relations if we start emailing that person again. I feel like in many cases, that individual may have left that particular Org and hence explains why they opted out. I would think there should be some Business Rules about sending emails to the next “qualified” email address, even if one or two people at the Org opts out of receiving emails?

While this situation applies mostly to Orgs in our case, we do have plenty of individuals that change email accounts and unsubscribes from their old email, and prefers emails to go to their new address. It still records the Opt Out Consent and suppresses their record from receiving emails.

Any thoughts from this great Community?

Faith Murray · September 2021

This is one of the limitations that caused us to switch our email marketing from Online Express to Mailchimp five years ago. Since Mailchimp integration is non-automated, it allows you to control what records are opted out when you import lists. The flexibility and control was worth the extra manual work for us. Also, at that time, OLX subscribers could not manage subscriptions, and so we had a high number of complete opt-outs because people could not choose what kind of emails they wanted from us.

Since it sounds as if you are doing manual manipulation anyhow, I would suggest making a Dummy Record for opt-out emails that have no other home. If one contact wants unsubscribed but a second one doesn't, move the unsubscribed email address to the Dummy Record.

As for people who re-subscribe under a different email, you will need to implement a quality control policy and process to search for people with multiple valid email addresses or a new email address recently entered (by Date Last Changed). To my knowledge, there is no way to Global Add a Consent, but you can Import an Opt-In consent to all affected records. RE will honor the Consent with the most current date field. Just be sure that you are in fact honoring the donor's wishes when you resubscribe them under an alternate email, of course. ?

Steve Townsend · September 2021

We don't have this problem with Org records because we don't include Orgs in mass emails that we send through OLX. However, I can comment on some of these points. As to email addresses resurfacing, we would only add the email address again if that person had contacted us and requested to opt in to receiving emails again. This also applies to new emails, so any time we add a new email we would also be adding a new consent record.

Steve Townsend · September 2021

Also, does OLX not suppress the email address rather than the constituent record? We have joint constituent records for our parents with one parent as the constituent and the other as non-constituent spouse. If OLX suppresses one, we can still email the other. So that it's clear in RE, we manually remove the Do not Email solicit code and mark the unsubscribed address DNC.

Keith Wilson · October 2021

We are a Faith-based religious non-profit. We do a lot of soliciting of churches (i.e. pastors, church leaders, and/or staff members) in our denomination. However, many of the smaller rural congregations have pastors and staff that use personal emails. We don't always get updated when one staff leaves and moves to another church. Those are the ones that end up “unsubscribing” because they are no longer associated with the church we sent the email to. We (by “we” I mean “I” ?) try to research the church via their website (if they have one) to ensure we have the most current contact info for the primary contact at the church. This is not easy, again because most of the rural congregations don't have websites.

Because we are part of a larger organization, we have a robust marketing department that handles most of our email campaigns. Therefore I have to run an email list (export) of email addresses and send to our marketing liaison. This creates additional issues of email bounces and unsubscribes not getting recorded in RE at all. When I compile the list I export multiple email types, for each individual and organization. It's a complicated mess trying to figure out which email for which person was the one that bounced or unsubscribed and making sure the whole record isn't suppressed because of the one bad email out of 2 or 3 good emails.

All of this has become a major pain point. We are looking at addressing this in the near future, so I was hoping to get ideas from the community on some best practices. Thank you for your input!

Keith Wilson · July 2022

Hoping to get more visibility on this discussion as we are about to embark on a major project of cleaning up our Email phone types in the database.

What steps have you taken to isolate and delete bad email addresses?

Do you remove emails that have been “unsubscribed”/"opted-out"?

Do you add new or replace the existing email if a donor provides a different email address with their online gift?

Also, I'm still unclear on how NXT handles email consents if more than one email is listed on a record--is the whole constituent record suppressed (i.e. “Requests No Email” check box), or just that specific email address?

For those using third party email platforms (MailChimp, etc.) how do you import bounced/unsubscribe data back into your NXT system?

Rachel Cavalier · July 2022

@Keith Wilson

Whenever we are about to export a new list for an email campaign, we require the marketing department to give us an update on the bounces and unsubscribes since the last mailing. Typically they give us the email address, whether it was a bounce or an unsubscribe and the date/related mailing.

We don't remove the unsubscribed/opted out emails - we can't market to them, but we can still send their acknowledgment emails for donations to those addresses.

We add new email addresses and mark those as the primary email address.

We don't use the "Requests No Email" checkbox, but I believe this applies to the constituent rather than per email address. For bounces, we mark the email address itself as "inactive" and "do not email" - and similarly we would use "do not email" on the specific email addresses if someone requested not to receive emails at all.

We don't get that many bounces or unsubscribes each time, so the import process is just a human manually updating one by one.

Steve Townsend · July 2022

@Keith Wilson we use OLX so most of our unsubscribes and bounces come from there. When someone unsubscribes through OLX it should add a solicit code of do not email to their record, so we can see that they've unsubscribed, but recently there has been a glitch in the system meaning that this does not happen. Therefore we (that is, I!) have to export a list of unsubscribes and import them using ImportOmatic.

We don't remove unsubscribed emails as there is a risk that someone in the future might find them and add them back in, however, when emails bounce we delete them.

We don't update contact details from online gift forms, we only update emails from an online form specifically for that purpose, which also includes a consent question.

I think how NXT handles email consents depends on how you record them. The only way to suppress a specific email address, other than by deleting it, AFAIK is to mark that email DNC. As we have joint records for our parents/alumni parents, with one as the primary and the other as spouse, we have to do this quite a lot.

Keith Wilson · July 2022

@Rachel Cavalier:
We add new email addresses and mark those as the primary email address.

@Rachel Cavalier Do these all have the same “Email” phone type? Do you allow only one Phone Type per record? We have one donor that uses a different email address with every gift--I think it is to avoid spam or marketing, and yes it is quite annoying!!

Rachel Cavalier · July 2022

@Keith Wilson
We allow more than one phone type per message, but we have “Email” and “Email 2.”

“Email” is for the most recent one that the supporter has used with us.. “Email 2” is for the others - they may have a number of work addresses that they have used when corresponding, which are still valid addresses.

Austen Brown · July 2022

@Keith Wilson - NXT will mark the unsubscribed/opt-out email with a “DNC” and add a consent record denoting the change. The consent will only add a solicit code to the record if you have set up the Business Rule to support the consent mapping.

I recommend utilizing types to keep track of ‘bad emails’ and keep them out of the general circulation - “Unsubscribed” and “Inactive”. I change the type for any unsubscribed/opt-out email as well as any email that is returned with a Hard Bounce response. If the email is a Hard Bounce, I also mark it as ‘inactive’.

Email Consent -- Opt Out Requests

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