Opt-in Status for Constituents

What is an opt-in?

Well, that’s pretty simple! An opt-in is our way of saying subscriber. If you have 1,000 opt-ins in Fireside, you have 1,000 subscribers. You’ll of course want to have an effective outreach program so that you are able to communicate effectively with your constituents to create strong relationships with them. By increasing your opt-in count, you’ll be in a great position to do so.

How do I change a constituent’s opt-in status?

For all constituents profiles in Fireside, the default status they are given is “No Preference,” which essentially means they have not indicated one way or another their desire to receive proactive newsletters or not. Constituents will have a “Yes” opt-in status if they’ve actively subscribed, for example, by filling out the newsletter subscription form on your site. Other places where constituents can subscribe include, but are not limited to, the contact form, a pop-up on your website’s homepage, or even a survey that you’ve sent out via newsletter or social media.

On occasion, there may be a constituent that decides to call your office to opt out of your newsletter program. In this case, you’ll want to manually opt that person out. Here’s how you’ll do that:

1. Do an instant search via Find People (magnifying glass, top left). You can search for a person by name, email address, mailing address, or phone number (or a combination of those!). Once you’ve found the individual in question, open up their people record.
   

2. Once in the people record, go to the Profile Summary section on the right, and find Opt-In.

3. Click the dropdown and choose Opted-Out. You should expect to see a green box appear in the upper-right confirming the change was saved, but that’s it! Marking someone as opted-out will automatically remove them from any mass emails your office chooses to send, and you do not need to take any additional steps to remove the person from your subscriber audience. By doing the above, you’ve already done that!

Additionally, you can opt in a large group of individuals by importing those folks into Fireside. Let’s say you had a large-scale event for constituents in the district and many people provided their emails when they signed in. That’s a great list of folks to add to your opt-ins. Check out our import process here for more details!

How do I figure out how many opt-ins I have?

There are a few ways you can check for this.

1. Go to the Dashboard (Fireside main page), and take a look at the People chart on the dashboard, which shows you the number of daily opt-ins for the past week (and total overall).

2. If you have access (ask an Account Manager on your team to grant the permission if you don’t), run an Advanced Report by going to Reports (bar graph) > Advanced Reports.

• The best reports to run are Total New Opt-ins Per Day, People Who Have Opted-in During a Time Range, and Total Opt-Outs per Day.

3. Go to Outreach > Audiences and use the audience editor to create an audience around the “OptIn” field. Note: Your office may already have an audience created that finds your subscribers. Feel free to use the search bar at the top to find an existing audience by name.

• Find the “OptIn” field under Default User Fields, and then click the refresh button to find the number of “Matched people.” You can click the circular refresh arrow just to the right to get an accurate count in the moment. Make sure to click “Save” when done making changes.

Opt-In Exceptions

It’s important to note that although someone can decide they want to opt in to email correspondence with your office (specific to the newsletter), it may be the case that they their previously valid email is now invalid. Or it may be the case that they don’t have an email address on file. In these cases, you may create an audience around opt-ins and find that the 1,000 people that have opted in actually goes down to 920 emails to which you can send proactive correspondence. As the audience tool is specific to people matching the criteria included and not exactly their contact info, you’ll want to keep that in mind.

The way to get a more accurate number of people you’ll be reaching would be to add a rule in the audience editor that ensures folks have an email address on file. You’ll want to make sure the joiner in the “Include People Matching” section is changed to “All Of the Following Rules.” Once that’s set, use the Default User Fields “OptIn” and “Email” on two separate lines. This will provide you an audience of people who are opted in and who also have a valid email on file. Here’s what that looks like:

So there you have it! And if you’d like to dive into how to most effectively increase your opt-in list, feel free to reach out at [e-mail] to set up a success coaching!