Introduction
Newsletters and other marketing communications are a great way to keep your contacts up to date on your organisation's latest news and offerings. It is essential however to send the emails only to the people who have expressed their interest in receiving your newsletters and also to offer them the option to unsubscribe at any point, should they wish to do so for any reason. CiviPlus offers a range of capabilities to help you comply with GDPR requirements and your contact’s preferences by using Groups to have a collection of recipients for each of your mailing lists, various Profile pages where contacts can subscribe to your mailing list, a Double opt-in option to ensure sign ups do not happen accidentally and various Tokens or Profile pages to offer a options to unsubscribe from a mailing list at any time.
Groups
The Setting up your mailing groups article describes the various ways you can set up groups for mailing.
Profiles
Profiles offer customisable interactive pages where you can choose which fields to include on the page for your contacts to fill in. They can be used for a number of different areas from registering new users to capturing someone’s consent and subscription to a Newsletter. To start setting up a Profile you can navigate to the Administer tab, look at the options under Customise Data and Screens and choose Profiles. Not all users will have the permissions to create and edit profiles, so please check with your local admin if this option isn’t available.
The subsequent page will show a list of all Profiles currently in your system. You can create a new profile by clicking the ‘Add Profile’ button in the top left.
Creating a Profile
The new profile creation page is broken down into two sections. In the first you provide the basic information of your Profile, including its name, a possible description and most importantly what the Profile will be used for. To use it as a sign-up page you need to check the Standalone Form or Directory box. You could also include additional pre and post form help instructions if you want to help your contacts when interacting with the Profile.
The second part is the Advanced Profile Settings that allows you to customise the behaviour of your Profile.
When setting up Profile to capture consents four options are important to consider:
You can choose a specific group to which Contacts will be added to automatically when the Profile is submitted. While this could be a useful solution in some cases, it is important to note that if you specify your Mailing List here, contacts will be added to the Group regardless of the giving consent in the Profile or not. It is best to not select your Mailing list here.
If you want to designate a central email list where you would like to receive a notification whenever a submission is made using this Profile, you can include it here.
If your Profile captures name and email address information, the system may use it to create new Contacts in CiviPlus. This is a useful feature that allows your contact base to grow organically by adding previously unknown people to your contacts if they interact with your organisation for the first time. However you may not wish to create a separate Drupal user for new registrants. As a best practice for Newsletter signups this option should be turned off.
A further important decision point is what the system should do if the submitter already exists as a Contact in your CiviPlus. In general duplicate creation should be avoided, however you also should enable the submitter to update their existing contact record to transcribe their consent or intention to remove it in the system. Update Matching Contact will allow your contacts to make the changes they would like to by submitting the Profile.
Profile fields
After you finish setting up your Profile next you have to include the fields you wish to display in the Profile. For a Mailing list subscription it is likely important to capture the First and Last name of the submitter, their email address and to display the Mailing Lists they can subscribe to. Some clients also create a “Yes/No” field to track mailing consent for every contact, to make this more visible.
In the Field Name option you select fields by choosing which entity you want to select from and selecting from the list of fields that belong to it on the second dropdown panel. To include a field that shows all the Mailing List groups that have their visibility set to public, you need to choose Contacts → Groups. You can also apply a different label to any of the fields to make them more informative for your contacts. Finally set the visibility on the fields to public to display them in public facing Profiles.
Using the Profile
To use the Profile you can include its link to for example your webpage. The correct link for the Profile can be found by navigating back to the list of Profiles under Administer → Customise Data and Screens → Profiles. If you click on the three dots for the profile your created and choose Use - Edit Mode you will be taken to the live instance of the Profile that allows users to Edit their details.
On the Edit Page data is auto populated for Contacts who have a record in CiviPlus with information for the relevant fields already filled in. If you are editing this while logged in, your own information will auto-populate in the profile. It is important to note that if you enter new information and submit, your own contact information will be updated.
In the bottom part you can see the results of adding the Group(s) field to the Profile. All Mailing List groups with Public visibility will be represented here. If the submitter checks the box next to the Newsletter they would like to subscribe to, they will be added to the group in CiviPlus.
The URL on the top is the link URL you can use if you want to direct people to this page from other mailings or pages.