CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

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)?

Thanks petednz

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

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.

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.