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The Do Not Contact and Transactional Only selections on a contact’s email address apply throughout GrowthZone in various ways, depending on where and how an email address is included in the recipient list.
The idea behind how the code uses those settings, to send or not send an email, should work for the broad majority of use cases. You shouldn’t have to think about it, but here is some information to help understand the logic behind it.
Do Not Contact
Do Not Contact is honored throughout the software; however, there are two known locations where we are NOT looking at the Do Not Contact setting:
- Invoice delivery - billing pending delivery, email invoices
- Groups that have “Disallow Opt Out” enabled
In these cases, we send out the email regardless of the Do Not Contact setting.
Transactional Only
The Transactional Only setting on a contact is honored at various places that emails are sent, but has a lot of logic depending on the situation.
Determining whether an email is going to look at the Transactional Only setting depends generally on whether the email is classified as a mass email or not, but may also be affected by several other exceptions where GrowthZone specifically chooses to look at the Transactional Only setting or chooses to ignore it.
Definitions and General Logic
General idea: If it is a mass email, then GrowthZone should honor the Transactional Only setting - because it is a mass email vs. a one-off email to an individual. One-Off emails are determined as 'should be acceptable' since the contact has a relationship with the association.
Email is considered mass email (i.e. marked as bulk, Is mass email=true) if either of the below are true:
- Newsletter (sent from Email Designer, because all of those are likely mass emails)
- Emailable entity* count is greater than threshold**
*What is an Emailable entity: the selections in your To: box. Could be an individual email address; a static list/committee; a dynamic list based on membership status ("Active", for example); event registrants; etc. Each of those selections is a single emailable entity.
**Threshold: the value set under Setup -> Communications -> Email Settings for Email Bulk Mode Threshold. 30 is the default; it must be set to something greater than 0. See Email Bulk Mode Threshold for more information.
Determining When/Where/How 'Transactional Only' Setting is Honored
Emails will not be sent to those with Transactional Only set to 'ON' in either of these cases:
- If it is a mass email:
- Except when sending to these emailable entities:
- Unknown
- OrganizationContact
- NotificationSubscription
- Membership (not selectable in GrowthZone but is used behind the scenes in various places such as the census, completion of an application, membership renewal processing)
- FundraisingCampaignDonors (Not even a validity check)
- ForumNotificationSubscriptions
- EventSponsors (Not even a validity check)
- EventNotRespondedInvitees
- EventExhibitors (Not even a validity check)
- EventAttendee
- EmailAddress
- Except when sending to these emailable entities:
- Or if the recipient list is to one of these emailable entities:
- RenewingMemberships (Selecting under Memberships, Renewals tab, Send Renewal Emails)
- MembershipType
- MembershipStatus (Active, Non-Member etc)
- Sending to a group
- Exception if “Disallow Opt Out” is enabled, this is sends regardless of the setting
Notes
Mixed emailable entities in your To: box: if you have mixed emailable entities* in your recipient list, the recipient will default to receiving the email.
For example, Bob has the Transactional Only setting enabled on his email address. Bob is an event sponsor. Bob also has a tag on his contact record. You select both the tag and event sponsors to receive an email, and you sent the email from Email Designer. Bob will get the email because you emailed event sponsors, which always ignores the Transactional Only setting.
*Mixed emailable entities means a mix of emailable entities (if you're emailing to a tag plus a list/committee plus an individual contact; that equals three emailable entity types) that look at the Transactional Only selection, and ones that don’t; see list above.
Emailable entities that are tough to get to the ‘mail merge’ threshold, thus making it so emails will often get through to those marked as Transactional Only.
- Tag
- Category
- IndividualContact
For example, you have your Email Bulk Mode Threshold set at 30. You pick 6 different tags that represent 2,000 recipients. These will all receive the email, regardless if they have Transactional Only selected, because the logic looks at the count of email entities (6) instead of the count of the contacts (2,000).
Example of where you commonly view various Emailable Entities: you can type the names of these in the To: box and select them from the drop-down. To get to this screen, click the … at the right side of the To: box in the email editor screen to open the Address Book selection window.
For example:
- Sending from the Events module WILL send emails to addresses that are marked to receive Transactional Only emails. It does NOT send emails to contacts that are marked as Do Not Contact on their contact record.
- Note: there is a Do Not Contact on the contact record itself, which is what we are discussing here. There may also a Do Not Contact option available for that email address within a List/Committee, which only affects delivery if the list/committee is being used as an emailable entity for the message; this setting is not part of this article.
- If you use the menu options under the event such as Send Event Invitation and choose 'Active' (which is a dynamic list based on membership status) or other options that are NOT specific lists, the Do Not Contact setting on the contact record is honored.
