I would be very surprised if you’ve managed to avoid the topic of GDPR until now. If your inbox is anything like mine, I bet you’re receiving notices of privacy policy updates from all the apps you use (I think I had a streak of five days in a row going last week). I’d like to contribute another policy-updates-and-plans post to the pile.
The new GDPR legislation has much to say about how we at Curated process information belonging to you, the Curated customer, and how you process your subscribers’ information. We spent a long time thinking about what we were going to build for you to solve some of the problems you’ll face as content creators and publishers once this new legislation comes into force, and I’d like to walk you through the solutions we designed and help you learn how to use these new tools.
The most worrisome question we needed to answer was if you needed to re-opt-in your entire list, because some of the early interpretations we read about GDPR seemed to suggest that you might. I wish I could give you a definite ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but unfortunately the answer is ‘it depends’.
The requirement to get consent as outlined in GDPR means that you need a way to prove that someone intentionally signed up to receive your newsletter. Luckily, if you built your list using Curated’s subscription forms, we have enough information about the date, time, and method by which that email was added to your list to be compliant with the GDPR definition of consent. However, if you imported your list or added emails manually, we don’t have a viable record of that person’s intent to subscribe. So we built tools and a process that will help you get GDPR-compliant consent from those subscribers, and we’re calling it the Reconfirmation Workflow.
Reconfirmation Workflow
If you need to get updated consents from your subscribers, here’s how that will work inside Curated:
We’re updating the Email Subscribers list view to show the subscription source of each email (publication site, manually added, etc). We’re also adding checkboxes so you can do batch actions, like batch unsubscribe or send a reconfirmation message (more on that later).
We’re adding a Status, called “Pending Confirmation”, that will be applied to emails on your list that were added manually, via our API, or via import once you send them a reconfirmation email.
We’re also introducing a new list view that shows only emails we suggest be reconfirmed, which will be accessible via the Subscribers menu, titled “Unconfirmed Subscribers”, so that you can send them the reconfirmation message if you want (and check back to see the number of unconfirmed emails decrease).
In the Settings > Hosting, Subscriptions and Publishing section, you’ll see a link to edit your Reconfirmation Message. This is the text in the email that you’ll send to Unconfirmed subscribers to get updated consent.
For those of you that need additional consents from your subscribers, you’ll use the new Subscription Form settings (also under Settings > Hosting, Subscriptions and Publishing) to add checkboxes to your subscription form. This new settings area also gives you more control over the appearance of your subscription form on your Publication Site.
Once you choose which subscribers to reconfirm, you’ll be able to send them a custom message with a clear call-to-action to resubscribe to your newsletter. Note: once you send them the reconfirmation message, those subscribers will be unsubscribed from your newsletter until they resubscribe using the link in that message.
Again, you can see all the subscribers that you’ve tried to reconfirm by filtering your Email Subscriber list by “Pending Confirmation”.
We’ve also updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use documents, and wrote a new doc titled “EU Privacy and Data Protection” to address specific concerns about the new legislation. Updating policy documents is much less fun than designing new features, but hopefully you find the documents helpful and informative. Please review those updated documents when you have a moment (or if you are really really bored).
We appreciate everyone’s patience as we’ve finalized our plans. If you have any questions about other aspects of GDPR as it relates to your Curated newsletter, you can email me directly at calvin@curated.co, or start a conversation with us from inside your Curated account.
Thank you for your business!
– Calvin Morris, Product Manager at Curated
