Compliance and opt-outs

Get this wrong and you are not just annoying people – you are exposing the campaign. The mechanics are handled for you; the judgement is not.

This page describes how the platform behaves and the habits that keep a program safe. It is not legal advice. Obligations differ by jurisdiction and by what kind of organisation you are – check yours.

What the platform does for you

An automated opt-out compliance check runs as part of the send, so problems surface before you commit rather than after.
An opt-out ledger keeps the record. Anyone who opts out is automatically excluded from every future send, across the whole account, permanently.

That last point matters more than it sounds. The exclusion is account-wide, not per-list. Someone who opts out of your fundraising program does not reappear in your volunteer recruitment program because a different organiser built a different segment.

You do not maintain a suppression list by hand, and you are not relying on a volunteer remembering.

What is still your job

Consent. The ledger records who left. It cannot tell you whether the people on your list ever agreed to hear from you in the first place. That is a question about how the list was built, and it is the one that actually creates risk.

Keep a source column on every record – petition, event, purchased list, previous campaign – so you can answer "why do we have this person's number" without guessing. See Audiences and segments.

Identifying yourself. Recipients should be able to tell who is contacting them from the message itself, without replying to find out.

Authorisation statements. Electoral communication in Australia generally carries an authorisation. What is required depends on the jurisdiction and the type of communication – confirm the current rules with your electoral commission each cycle, because they change.

Honouring the spirit, not just the word. Someone who replies "please stop", "unsubscribe", "no thanks" or an unambiguous expletive has opted out, whatever the exact keyword was. Watch the shared inbox for these and record them.

Cadence is a compliance issue, not just a courtesy

Most complaints are not about the first message. They are about the fourth in a fortnight. Volume produces opt-outs, opt-outs shrink your list permanently, and a shrinking list is a strategic problem as much as a legal one.

Two habits:

Suppress recent contacts. Exclude anyone contacted in the last N days from the next send.
Watch the opt-out rate per send, not in aggregate. A jump on one send tells you that message was wrong for that list. Change the message rather than pushing more volume through.

Handle a complaint properly

When someone complains rather than simply opting out:

Stop contacting them immediately, across every program.
Answer once, briefly, from a real person. Say how you got their details and confirm they have been removed.
Record it. A complaint you cannot find later is a complaint you cannot explain later.
Look for the pattern. One complaint is noise. Five on the same send is a message or a list problem.

Before every send, the short check

Is this list one we can justify contacting?
Does the message identify us?
Does it carry the authorisation it needs?
Have we excluded recent contacts?
Is someone rostered to read the replies?

Five questions, thirty seconds, and it catches nearly everything.