Removing Old Members and/or Unsubscribe Button

[Proulx06]

I have a problem that may have multiple solutions. Essentially, we need to be able to send marketing emails (upcoming tryouts, merchandise sales, etc) to ACTIVE members of our site (those who currently or have recently played with us). Unfortunately we have hundreds, maybe thousands, of people on our site who have't been with us for years. We have 8000 members on our site (I'm sure a ton are duplicates or originally loaded members back when SE would help you do that). When we send a marketing email, we get a ton of 'MY KID HASN'T PLAYED HERE IN 5 YEARS PLEASE REMOVE ME ASAP'. Literally dozens of those emails. 

 

Now, a major issue is the lack of an unsubscribe button at the bottom of emails. These days, SE requires people to log in. People don't want to have to log in to change their email preferences...and so they reply and yell at us instead. 

 

Now when they yell at us, we don't have a great way to quickly remove people - we must go into the permissions screen for each member of their family and remove from site. It's a hassle that would be resolved with the inclusion of an unsubscribe button. 

 

Finally, I am familiar with smart groups, but I'm curious if SE support would be able to build me a smart group (or include this in the site setup) where we can email a smart group that includes everyone who registered for ANYTHING on our site for the last X number of years. We have dozens of registrations any given year so managing that manually is difficult. A preset smart group would be a rolling smart group, where older members would fall off and we wouldn't be emailing people from 2017 tryouts for 2022. 

 

Not sure how active this forum is anymore...but are there solutions I'm overlooking?

[Felzani, Matthew]

_{Is the absence of an "Unsubscribe" link compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act? If not doesn't that open SportsEngine / Leagues up to fines:}

_{https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business ?}

_{An excerpt from the site:}

Quote

_{Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.}

 

[jpt_lsjba]

Proulx06, good post and topic.  Very timely for me as I was just about to research the same topic.  Hoping that SE addresses this and not sure if this falls under Do Not Contact laws as most orgs are volunteer orgs I am guessing but for sure there should be an unsubscribe link without having to login as well as a more efficient way to help clean up older memberships.

[jyarosz]

There is an older thread that is now locked that also asks this question.  It's 5 years old and still no solution to something so simple.  Really SportsEngine?

[Marie Fitzgerald]

Thanks for bringing this back to our attention - we are in the middle of bringing this Community Site back up as it's been in the dark for the past year or so. 

The best way to create groups to ensure you are only messaging current members is to create a smart group from your most recent registration, you can do this by going to the registration and clicking "create group" from the options shown here:

Once you create a group from a registration, you can go back and either message from the directory and select multiple groups, or you can message directly from the Registrations page which you can see as an option here as well. A lot of times, organizations will use their Season Sign Up as the registration to create a Smart Group for as that includes all active members for a specific season. 

Link to help article for more details > https://help.sportsengine.com/en/articles/6321726-how-to-create-a-smart-group-from-a-registration

 

In regards to deleting accounts or removing old accounts, this can get a little trickier. I included some helpful articles below that should assist with this:

1. How to delete unclaimed or unused profiles in your member directory - https://intercom.help/SportsEngine/en/articles/6310755-how-to-delete-unclaimed-unused-profiles-in-the-member-directory

2. How to merge duplicate accounts - https://intercom.help/SportsEngine/en/articles/6310519-how-to-merge-duplicate-profiles

 

If you are looking for more in-depth help, our amazing Support team is available to dive deeper with you. You can contact them via the blue "Need Help?" tab in your HQ account (as seen in the screenshot above)

[mmbench]

I'm looking for information on that as well. 

We have hundreds of members, but many haven't been active in years and need to be removed.  We don't want to use the group from the latest registration because that leaves out people as well.  The profiles are claimed, but they are people no longer interested in our league/sport.

[freezinKT]

26 minutes ago, Felzani, Matthew said:

_{Is the absence of an "Unsubscribe" link compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act? If not doesn't that open SportsEngine / Leagues up to fines:}

_{https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business ?}

_{An excerpt from the site:}

 

I have been assuming that, like with everything else they don’t want to do, they claim the responsibility lies with us to comply.

[Felzani, Matthew]

3 hours ago, freezinKT said:

I have been assuming that, like with everything else they don’t want to do, they claim the responsibility lies with us to comply.

But it's not even possible for compliance to be done by the League as that would mean we'd need to check every account against some kind of external list we maintain to see if we can send them marketing-type information. I guess that's possible, though completely impractical. And also create a channel by which someone can declare their intent to opt-out so we could manage that for current and future communications.

@Marie Fitzgerald - if you're still watching this one could you share your thoughts? The "receive commercial emails" consent is at the Account level not the Registration level (i.e. - a person should not have to say, "Don't send me emails," for each Registration he/she creates). Does SE provide a way to manage the opt out? If not, how have Leagues done it?

If the FTC determines a violation has occurred the fines can be massive, and they're on a per-email basis.

And if there is a flag it shouldn't be all-or-nothing as the 'transactional or relationship' messages should still get delivered. More info on this is in the aforementioned article on the FTC site.