pratishta
commented
2 months ago -
How does this product allow users to sign up for notifications about some events but not others? We want to give users the option to sign up for updates on projects in any combination of community districts and/or citywide. What feature from the vendor supports this use case? There's a concept of notification category and also [preferences] (https://docs.suprsend.com/docs/preferences#user-preference-settings) where users can subscribe to a category, a channel within a category, or a channel. This might work well enough with how we have the boroughs set up as a wider category, with the districts being individual "channels" within to subscribe to.
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Does the vendor support SMS (texting) as well as email? Yes, SuprSend calls 3rd party integrations vendors and they have multiple options for SMS
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Does it automatically support sending users confirmation emails before actually subscribing them or is that something we would have to implement ourselves? Unclear... but given the flexibility of workflows, it's likely possible to set one up that automatically sends a confirmation email once a user subscribes to notifications
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Does the product have the concept of a staging (aka "test" or "dev") environment baked in? If not, how would we accomplish that? There's a concept of workspaces and we'd get sandbox, staging and production environments with a SuprSend account
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How does the vendor allow users to unsubscribe from notifications? Does it give users a web page they can visit to manage their subscriptions or only simple "unsubscribe" links in the individual emails? Supports both methods with specific email integrations. Example with SendGrid. API call to remove users from a list
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What analytics/observability features does the product offer? Does it show us how often our notifications are actually being open and read? Provides logging, including notification status that includes whether a notification has been delivered, seen, interacted, etc
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How does templating for emails work? Does the product offer a built-in template builder? Does it allow us to format the emails in code, such as with a templating language like Handlebars? Has a robust templating system, there is a template builder that can be used entirely without code. Includes documentation for handlebars helpers
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Does the product support "batching" or "digests"? We may want to send notifications to their API in real time but have the notifications be aggregated and sent to users on a set schedule, such as daily. Yes it's possible to add this as a "node" to the notification workflow we create
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We may want to let users subscribe to get notifications on a different schedules. For example, a user could get an email either daily or weekly with all of the notifications since the last email. Does the product support that out of the box? Yes with dynamic batch window
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What security/compliance accreditations does the vendor have? Such as SOC II, FedRamp, ISO 27001 SOC 2 mentioned
This Issue is a research spike to evaluate SuprSend as the notification vendor to use for the ZAP Listserv project.
Goals
High-level user stories for the project can be found in Figma here.
Research questions
In addition to the user stories, here are some specific questions to answer in your research:
Notes
The engineer taking this on is encouraged to create a free account with the vendor if a free tier is offered and play around. You're also encouraged to reach out to the vendor to schedule a demo. Please CC @TylerMatteo on all comms with vendors.
Deliverables
The developer taking this on should document answers to these questions as well as their overall impression of the vendor. Documentation can be put in comments to this Issue or a GH Discussion to be linked to in a comment below.
AE will be presenting this research at Technical Design Review on 8/26. @TylerMatteo will follow up with details on how to incorporate research into the slide deck mid-sprint.