Newletter list structure and sign-up form changes

[ajparsons]

Problems:

1. I'm looking at starting up the research newsletter and want to merge the section of the current research mailing list who have signed up explicitly into the main list without signing them up to the main mailing list (no need to reconfirm them). But I don't want them to receive the main mailing list by default.

2. Section pages on main website do not sign people up to interests. You can sign up to newsletters on the newsletters page, but this gets relatively few views compared to the ‘section’ pages (Democracy, FOI, better cities, research).

Solutions:

1) Create a new ‘interest’ of ‘main mySociety Newsletter’ and (once new sign-up forms live) apply it retrospectively to all current subscribers. This will also have the effect of making segment creation more straightforward (which means with some template modification only one email will be needed per newsletter). This can be a hidden options on forms where we expect people to only sign up to one newsletter. This means we can import research people without signing them up to the main mailing list (although we should give them that option in text).

2) Amend sign-up forms for section pages to be explicit about signing up for the interest mailing list. This would look like this on each section with boxes pre-ticked (e.g. for FOI):

And on the newsletters page, something like this:

3) The onboarding email should include logic to tell people what if/any they’ve signed up to and a more direct link to where they can change their preferences.

So the complete set of steps for setting up the research newsletter would be:

• [x] Create new interest group ‘mySociety news’
• [x] Adjust all sign-up forms on website to auto-tick that and provide options for appropriate specialist lists. (should be done pretty much at the same time as one, don’t want any sign-ups in the middle).
  • Auto-checking the "mySociety news" group – https://github.com/mysociety/orgsites/issues/998
• [x] Retrospectively apply interest to all previous users.
• [x] Create new segment for ‘Interest: mySociety news‘
• [x] Adjust newsletter template to include branching logic
• [ ] Adjust onboarding email to include details of which lists signed up to.
• [x] Create new interest group of mailing list - Civic Tech Research
• [x] Create new ‘Civic Tech Research list segment’
• [x] Adjust newsletter widgets on mysociety newsletter page, mysociety.org research page and research.mysociety.org to point towards new segment.
  • https://github.com/mysociety/orgsites/issues/999

Specifically, want to check and confirm the thinking that:

a) we should have the main newsletter as effectively a pre-ticked interest. b) the section pages should give the option of signing up to the specialist lists

[ajparsons]

This has now been done, all sign-up forms should require one interest to be populated (or be doing it in the background). All existing users without an interest have been added to the mysociety news segment. I have a dump of which users these applied to if we need to figure something out later.

The research list was imported into the main list where they signed up using a hosted form or embed form (so we have a record of consent), excluding those few emails who had unsubscribed or bounced from the main list. Where they already had name, etc info in the main list, this wasn’t imported from the research list. All these users have a status marker saying they’ve been imported from the research list - so can be traced back to their signup using the info in the research list. We should retain this list for a while, and then download and archive it.

I'll keeping an eye on the new sign-ups for the next few weeks to make sure everyone is correctly getting an interest.