You can now say that an automatic list is transactional. This means we treat it like individually chosen in that it ignores opt-outs.
GDPR requires you to take some care when using such lists. It will rightly concern people who have opted-out if you send them mail shots. You should only use transactional email for communications that are personal to them, for example concerning their membership or an event booking.
Contents
Background
An automatic list selects it subscribers according to a built-in rule that you select, the list source, along with any source-specific options. You can think of them as saved search criteria. Contrast with a manual list where you subscribe people to it explicitly.
Communications like membership renewal reminders or delivering event tickets are transactional. They are messages that concern the recipient personally. They would expect to receive event tickets they had purchased, even if they had opted out of all emails. For that Cameo has always treated templates sent via individually chosen or any of services… (such as services task) as transactional. Cameo sends them even if the recipient has opted out of all other emails. (We also never purge transactional emails and show them separately in member info → past communications).
However, we have identified a few cases where you need to be able to send messages via a list which count as transactional. For example:
- Someone who has opted-out of all wants a paper newsletter. You identify recipients via a list which looks at the delivery method and number of copies fields in the membership record in order to produce labels. If someone opts out from all lists, they do not get a label. Household memberships complicate this: if we have a one individual who has opted-out and another that has not, but does not have an email address, the household still gets a label. The label only fails where everyone, or a sole individual, has opted-out.
- Shortly before an event, you send out a reminder to all attendees. This might contain a link to the attendance form for them to join the online event, or a link to cast a vote. Clearly, these should be transactional emails, even though they use an automatic list to identify attendees. However, you might consider using the same list source to advertise another event to people who booked for a previous event. That is not transactional: you must ask for permission to do so (the booking form has an option to do this) and respect opt-outs.
In principle, we could solve the first of these with a combination list and some manual management. But that has proved too complex and requires spotting the people it affects.
Cameo had a grander plan to address this along with some other difficulties caused by opt-outs. For example:
- which list do you mean when it is a combination of other lists; and
- when you have many lists, how does the recipient understand the opt-outs forms offer them?
Unfortunately the details of this continue to pose significant design and logistical problems so it has not happened yet.
Therefore, this change provides an interim solution.
Transactional automatic lists
A list can be public or not. When set up to do so, relevant forms offer public lists self-service subscription (for example, the optout form). Private lists are never shown to the recipient.
The new transactional lists cannot also be public. Therefore, we have replaced the tick box to make a list public with a menu to choose between private, public or transactional (Fig 1).
When you choose transactional, the only functional difference is that opt-outs (primarily opt out from all) are ignored. This option is not offered for manual lists.
We reflect this status throughout the rest of the system. You can filter lists on their transactional status in both communications → lists and member tasks → list subscriptions. The latter displays subscriptions to such a list a little differently (and in particular does not offer an opt-out).
When making a proforma template for emailing event attendees (the email attendees button in events & bookings → reservations, bookings and attendance), you now also say whether you want this for transactional purposes or not.