Beacon makes it easy to collect contact preferences for your contacts on any of your signup, donation, event, or membership forms.
The contact preferences field
The Contact preferences field on your People records represents a list of channels that your supporters have opted-in to.
By default, the field supports the following options (you can add more if you like):
Email
Phone
Direct Mail
SMS
To Opt-In or not to Opt-In?
That is the question... 2018's GDPR states that all consent to contact from a company, must be opt-in. Consent to be contacted must be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous and given by a clear affirmative action. As such, asking people to opt-out of predefined settings contradicts the GDPR.
Beacon Contact Preferences are set up to be opt-in only, and we recommend leaving these as is - although you can of course add more options for people to opt-in to!
Contact preferences in forms
When creating a new form, a contact preferences section is enabled by default:
On your form, this appears like so:
"Opt-in" vs "Explicit" layout
Beacon supports two different "layouts" in the section: "opt-in", and "explicit".
Opt-in
This is the default option, displayed as a list of checkboxes in your form. Submitters can select one option, multiple options, or no options at all.
Note: If someone already exists in the database, the channels that they pick will be added to their contact preferences field. Existing opt-ins will not be removed.
Explicit
If you'd like to collect an absolute yes/no answer for every channel, you can change the layout to explicit, which is displayed differently.
In this layout, form submitters must choose a "Yes" or "No" value for every channel.
Note: If someone already exists in the database, the channels that they pick will overwrite all of their existing contact preference options.
Renaming and hiding options
If you'd like to hide an option, or use a different label on your form, click on that option in your form settings:
