UPDATED FUNCTIONALITY - *ALL* People Added to Membership Management Must Opt In

This is one of the GDPR / privacy updates.

This is one of the most significant changes implemented to FreeToastHost to bring it in line with new GDPR / privacy regulations and "best practices". With that said, we know this change is likely going to cause many of you some consternation and upset. (We get that.) Sorry, but we have to do this in one fashion or another.

We now must require all additions of people's contact information to Membership Management to be done via an explicit Opt-In. We had already been discussing this before all this discussion about the GDPR regulations came about as a "best practice".

Given that most clubs add new members, prospects, guests, former members, and friend contact information to Membership Management without any intervention by the new person added, I considered how to best do this without messing up that existing "work flow". What I came up with is a sort of "inactivated status" that new people are tagged with until they click the opt-in link in an opt-in email that is automatically generated by the system and sent to them. People who have not yet clicked the opt-in link are treated like "zombies" in the system... they exist in Membership Management but you cannot do anything useful with them and they are filtered out of list emails.

There is a *lot* that I have had to consider with implementing this, so I am going to break this up into several posts in this topic thread.

To illustrate how this works, lets add a hypothetical new Prospect to Membership Management.


When I click Save, I will now receive a new notification pop-up:


The save completes while I read the new pop-up, and then I see the following:


Notice what is different here. Note that this person's information has been saved, but it is shown with a strike through to indicate that the person has not yet opted in. (They have up to 30 days to click the link or their info gets deleted by the system.) Additionally, many of the buttons are disabled for this person and you will find that you cannot do anything other than delete them with the Membership Tools menu. Once the person clicks the Opt-in link in the email, they are "activated" and no more strike-through and you can freely work with their information.

BTW, if you are working in Membership Management when someone clicks the Opt-in link (and they tell you), just click the Save button to refresh the table and see the update without the strikeout. The Save doubles as a "refresh" for this situation.

Now lets look at the email side of this...

Here is the automatically generated email that the new person receives when they are added:


If they click the link to approve (opt-in) their addition to the website, then they see a landing page and the website administrator gets a notification email like the following:
(the new person's contact info can be readily used without any system imposed restrictions)


If they click the link to decline their addition to the website, then they see a landing page and the website administrator gets a notification email like the following:


BTW, the landing page looks similar to the following:

Ok, let's consider something typical... the new person loses the opt-in email or it gets stuck it their spam folder. I have also added a new "tool" on the Membership Tools drop-down...


Generally speaking, this function and the delete function are about the only things that will work for new members added that have not opted-in yet.

When I click the above menu selection, I see the following:


This lets me re-send the opt-in email to the new member/prospect/guest...etc.

So yes, this is big, messy, cumbersome... and we had to do it. People must be given the explicit choice to have their contact information added to a website even when that choice seems obvious and even when they have verbally approved it.

Moving forward, I may change the styling of the people not yet activated to something different than strikeout. Another possibility would be to put them on their own tab in Membership Management, but that would be more work than I wanted to do right now until I give you all a chance to "beat this up".

I may revise the wording of the emails if that makes sense.

Additionally, currently all the approved / declined notifications just go to the website admin. I will probably need to set up a new pop-up checklist to let clubs and districts specify where to send those. (patience please...)

Other than a suggestion to totally get rid of this, if anyone has any suggestions on how to make this easier / more user friendly I am all ears. Brian and I have been beating this concept around quite a bit trying to figure out the best way to do this.

Hi Steve

Appreciate all you are doing to keep FTH up to date and compliant with the myriad rules and regulations.

One thing that occurs to me is that if a Prospect doesn't have an email address there is little point in generating an email that won't go anywhere .

Cheers
Kingsley