When we are sending out newsletters, etc, we add all outstanding volunteers to our newsletter group (newly added volunteers that are not in the group). We now have a volunteer who has unsubscribed, but our process has added him back in again. There is an "exclude group", but we receive no notification that he has unsubscribed. Has anyone had this problem and/or found a solution?
Graeme Murray
Voluntary Action Barnsley
This whole area is going to become a big issue next year with the new GDPR regulations coming into force.
I think it is likely that sending out bulk mail will have to be done using established services (such as MailChimp or CharityEmail) because they have all the facilities for handling subscriptions (and more importantly unsubscribes) correctly.
I have just noticed that the volunteer had set the flag "NO BULK EMAILS (User Opt Out)", but bulk emailing a group he was a member of (rightly or wrongly) overwrote this flag.
Graeme Murray
Voluntary action Barnsley
Hi Guys
The emailing component in CiviCRM (which is what VBase Cloud is built on) is very well used with over 10,000 installs, including some sites with millions of contacts.
The various flags are explained in the manual, which I've linked below
https://docs.civicrm.org/user/en/stable/email/maintaining-healthy-email-...
In normal setups we would create a smart group for newsletter subscribers (assuming we're automatically adding them in) and therefore you wouldn't need to manually add people into it and lose their preferences.
In a nutshell if someone unsubscribes from the newsletter they will be removed from the group, if they opt out of all emailings then they'll get the no-bulk emails flag set and if the email address bounces for any reason the email address will be put on hold. Adding a person to a mailing group if they have the no-bulk email flag set will mean they will not get mailing sents via the mailing tool but they may still get updates if they apply for an opp etc.
Finally on GDPR, CiviCRM alreay operates on the opt in process and is fully GDPR complaint, on a par with Mailchimp and the other tools. Probably some guidelines around best practises would be useful?