Communication Preferences and Unsubscribes
Understanding and respecting your donors' communication preferences is an important part of building positive relationships with your supporters.
DonorDock provides three settings to help your organization track and manage a contact's communication preferences:
Do Not Solicit helps your organization identify contacts who do not want to be included in solicitation efforts.
Unsubscribed prevents a contact from receiving bulk marketing emails through DonorDock.
SMS Unsubscribed prevents a contact from receiving text messages through DonorDock.
Do Not Solicit
Do Not Solicit identifies contacts who have asked not to be solicited through channels such as phone, email, or mail.
This setting is primarily used for reporting and segmentation. It can help you filter these contacts out of reports and exclude them when creating marketing lists.
Contacts marked as Do Not Solicit are excluded from applicable report results by default. If you need to include them:
Open the report.
Click the blue Filters button.
Check Include Do Not Solicit.
Use the Do Not Solicit setting when building reports or lists for fundraising and outreach so you can easily identify contacts who have requested not to be solicited.
The Do Not Solicit setting does not prevent DonorDock from sending emails or text messages to a contact.
To prevent bulk marketing emails, the contact must be Unsubscribed.
To prevent text messages, the contact must be SMS Unsubscribed.
Unsubscribed (Email)
The Unsubscribed status prevents a contact from receiving bulk marketing emails sent through DonorDock Outreach.
Contacts can unsubscribe by clicking the unsubscribe link included in a marketing email. You can also manually unsubscribe a contact from their contact record using Contact Actions.
All bulk marketing emails sent through DonorDock Outreach automatically include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.
If you would like to control where the unsubscribe link appears, you can add the {{unsubscribe}} merge tag to your email.
Marketing List Opt-Out Settings
Marketing Lists can be marked as available for selective opt-out.
When a Marketing List has Available for Opt Out enabled, contacts who receive an email sent to that list can click the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email and choose to remove themselves from that specific list.
They will also still have the option to unsubscribe from all marketing emails.
This gives contacts more control over the types of communication they receive. For example, a contact may want to unsubscribe from “Event Updates” but stay subscribed to “Newsletter.”
Only Marketing Lists with Available for Opt Out enabled will appear as individual list options on the unsubscribe page.
SMS Unsubscribe (Texts)
Contacts can opt out of text messaging by replying STOP to your organization's DonorDock SMS phone number.
When a contact replies STOP, DonorDock marks the contact as SMS Unsubscribed. Once unsubscribed, the contact will not receive text messages sent through DonorDock.
A contact can also resubscribe themselves to text messages by texting START to your organization's DonorDock SMS phone number.
The Unsubscribe Report can help you identify when a contact unsubscribed and which email prompted the unsubscribe.
To run the report:
Navigate to Reporting > Reports.
Locate the Standard Activity Reports.
Select Unsubscribe Report.
The report includes information such as:
Contact email address
Spouse email address, if applicable
Current subscription status
Date the contact unsubscribed
Subject line of the email from which the contact clicked the unsubscribe link
Contacts who are manually unsubscribed from their contact record will not appear on the Unsubscribe Report.