Event Marketing suggestion/request

[Upperholme]

I have a client who uses CiviCRM to (amongst other things) promote and manage their events programme. They use groups to segment their contacts, and CiviMail to send targeted mailings to promote upcoming events.

Sometimes they receive replies to their mailings of the form "Thanks for your message about this event, but we won't be able to get along", or similar.

What my client wants to do is have a simple method whereby they can ensure that this contact, whilst remaining in the group/s that are being used by CiviMail to market the event, does not get further mailings about this event, which could be construed as spam or could otherwise erode goodwill.

The only way we can see of doing this currently is to set up a group, let's call it 'Exclude from mailing' that we put these contacts into, and use this group as an exclude group for further mailings about this event. Of course, once the marketing communications about the given event are complete, we then need to remember to remove all the contacts from this group, and leave it empty, ready for the next event. It's a workable solution, but less than ideal, relying as it does on manual intervention to remove contacts at the end of the campaign. And of course, in a situation where they might be marketing several different events simultaneously, it quickly starts to get complicated.

Has anyone else come across this situation? How have you handled it? Is there a better way.

Maybe we could use CiviCampaign in some way to develop a solution that is more elegant, along the lines of:
Create a campaign for a given event, and have a field for every contact such that they could be excluded form any given campaign (a select list of live campaigns, maybe)?

[petednz]

Hi Graham

you don't say it explicitly (or i am not reading this well) but it sounds like you have ruled out making a unique 'promote to these people' Group for each Event which they can then unsub from in the normal way

[Upperholme]

Thanks petednz

That's an option that we hadn't considered, and which may be better (just need to think through the implications).

[Upperholme]

Having considered the option of creating a new 'promote to these people' group for each event and allowing them to unsubscribe, I don't think this meets the needs of this situation. I've reviewed some of the details of what's happening, and the recipients are not unsubscribing, they are replying, really helpfully, and saying "Thanks, would love to come, but I'm already busy that day". I think it's great that they are taking the time to reply in this way, and getting them to unsubscribe would perhaps not be obvious to them, hence my request.

Thanks for the suggestion though, made me think through it again, which is useful.

[joanne]

If you created an (ordinary) group for each event as Pete suggested, then you could just remove them from that group when you receive the 'thanks, but no thanks' email.  Just as quick as adding them to an 'Exclude from mailing' group.

[Upperholme]

Thanks Joanne

Clearly there are manual solutions to this issue.

I guess what I'm suggesting here is that this is likely to be a fairly common situation for many users, and was wondering whether there might be value in looking at a more elegant solution.

[joanne]

Your contacts must be very different from ours, who will just ignore any event invitation that they are not interested in.

I will follow this topic with interest.